How to check balance on a bunch of wallet.dat files?

[superbotolo]

In the past few years, I have played with several versions of Bitcoin Core on different computers. I have kept all the wallet.dat files in a USB flashdrive, but I have uninstalled all the Bitcoin Core versions I had.

I have now reinstalled Bitcoin Core (it's currently syncing the blockchain) and I would like to check the balance on these wallet.dat files I have. Most likely they are all 0 BTC, but I would like to double check, before throwing them out.

How do I do this? Do I just replace the wallet.dat file in the folder recently created by Bitcoin Core?

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[ranochigo]

Yes. The easiest way is for you to check it using your client and replacing the wallet.dat file everytime. If you'd like, you can place them all in the data directory and run -wallet=(your wallet.dat) to change the wallet file one by one.

The former is definitely easier though. Why would you throw the wallet file away?

[superbotolo]

The former is definitely easier though. Why would you throw the wallet file away?

I have way too many wallets of different coins around. I need to do some cleaning to understand whether I have some coin left somewhere and start using one client and one wallet.

[LoyceV]

Bitcoin Core supports multiple wallets:

The release notes for 0.15 seem to explain it: https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.15.0.1#multi-wallet-support
2nd paragraph explains how to use multiple wallets:

Multi-wallet is enabled by using more than one -wallet argument when starting Bitcoin, either on the command line or in the Bitcoin config file.

This way, you can rescan them all at once, which saves time.
As an alternative, you can just make a script/batch-file with "bitcoin -wallet=wallet1.dat" and the whole list. Start them all sequentially, and close them if they're empty after a rescan.

[Kakmakr]

The former is definitely easier though. Why would you throw the wallet file away?

I have way too many wallets of different coins around. I need to do some cleaning to understand whether I have some coin left somewhere and start using one client and one wallet.

There is nothing wrong with using more than one wallet, it is actually recommended. Why do you want a single point of failure, if you can distribute the risk to more than one wallet strategy? I use a wide veriety of wallets <Desktop / Hardware / Paper wallets / Web wallets> for different reasons and I never discard any of them.

You can even use old wallets as a early warning system <Wet Trap> to notify you, if someone is watching you or monitoring your online activities. ^smile^