Error when using a wildcard for downloading all profiles.

[Feri-D]

I have tried to retrieve all profiles from my org to make a backup and it gives an error
I have tried as
sf crud-mdapi read --metadata "Profile" -o DEV
or
sf crud-mdapi read --metadata "Profile:*" -o DEV

and both gave me this response

reading Profile:*, Profile:Admin ...
Error (1): Failed to retrieve Profile:*

My workaround is this

sf project retrieve start --metadata "Profile" -o DEV # to get the list
sf crud-mdapi read --source-dir force-app/main/default/profiles -o DEV # to get the full profile

Is there a way to detect the profile list from org and download them all, for a periodic backup?
Usually I use an empty profile folder so I can track added or removed profiles too.

[amtrack]

Hi @Feri-D,

neither this plugin nor the CRUD Metadata API itself support wildcards.

But that's where Bash scripting can be pretty handy.

Fortunately sf has a global --flags-dir flag: Instead of specifying lots of --metadata Profile:A --metadata Profile:B flags, we can create a file named metadata with a content like:

Profile:A
Profile:B

So here's how I would list and download the Profiles from an org:

# create a directory for the sf --flags-dir
mkdir -p backupcmdflags
# list all Profiles from the org and write to the file to be used with --flags-dir
node -pe 'JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(0, "utf8")).result.map(p => `Profile:${p.fullName}`).join("\n")' < <(sf org list metadata --metadata-type Profile --json) > backupcmdflags/metadata
# run the command
sf crud-mdapi read --flags-dir backupcmdflags