batch bat to copy folder and content at once

Question

I m writing a batch script that does a copy  I want to script it to copy an entire folder  When I want to copy a single file  I do this   copy   dp0file txt file txt    If I have a folder with this structure  is there a command to copy this entire folder with its contents all at once while preserving the exact structure   mainfolder    file1 txt   file2 txt   insidefolder       file3 txt      file4 txt       file5 txt

User · Answer

I suspect that the xcopy command is the magic bullet you re looking for   It can copy files  directories  and even entire drives while preserving the original directory hierarchy  There are also a handful of additional options available  compared to the basic copy command   Check out the documentation here    If your batch file only needs to run on Windows Vista or later  you can use robocopy instead  which is an even more powerful tool than xcopy  and is now built into the operating system  It s documentation is available here

User · Answer

The old way   xcopy  source   destination   E   xcopy is deprecated  Robocopy replaces Xcopy  It comes with Windows 8  8 1 and 10   robocopy  source   destination   E   robocopy has several advantages    copy paths exceeding 259 characters multithreaded copying   More details here

User · Answer

I ve been interested in the original question here and related ones   For an answer  this week I did some experiments with XCOPY   To help answer the original question  here I post the results of my experiments   I did the experiments on Windows 7 64 bit Professional SP1 with the copy of XCOPY that came with the operating system   For the experiments  I wrote some code in the scripting language Open Object Rexx and the editor macro language Kexx with the text editor KEdit   XCOPY was called from the Rexx code   The Kexx code edited the screen output of XCOPY to focus on the crucial results   The experiments all had to do with using XCOPY to copy one directory with several files and subdirectories   The experiments consisted of 10 cases  Each case adjusted the arguments to XCOPY and called XCOPY once   All 10 cases were attempting to do the same copying operation   Here are the main results    1  Of the 10 cases  only three did copying   The other 7 cases right away  just from processing the arguments to XCOPY  gave error messages  e g    Invalid path  Access denied   with no files copied   Of the three cases that did copying  they all did the same copying  that is  gave the same results    2  If want to copy a directory X and all the files and directories in directory X  in the hierarchical file system tree rooted at directory X  then apparently XCOPY -- and this appears to be much of the original question -- just will NOT do that   One consequence is that if using XCOPY to copy directory X and its contents  then CAN copy the contents but CANNOT copy the directory X itself  thus  lose the time-date stamp on directory X  its archive bit  data on ownership  attributes  etc   Of course if directory X is a subdirectory of directory Y  an XCOPY of Y will copy all of the contents of directory Y WITH directory X  So in this way can get a copy of directory X   However  the copy of directory X will have its time-date stamp of the time of the run of XCOPY and NOT the time-date stamp of the original directory X   This change in time-date stamps can be awkward for a copy of a directory with a lot of downloaded Web pages   The HTML file of the Web page will have its original time-date stamp  but the corresponding subdirectory for files used by the HTML file will have the time-date stamp of the run of XCOPY   So  when sorting the copy on time date stamps  all the subdirectories  the HTML files and the corresponding subdirectories  e g    x htm  x files   can appear far apart in the sort on time-date   Hierarchical file systems go way back  IIRC to Multics at MIT in 1969  and since then lots of people have recognized the two cases  given a directory X   i  copy directory X and all its contents and  ii  copy all the contents of X but not directory X itself   Well  if only from the experiments  XCOPY does only  ii    So  the results of the 10 cases are below  For each case  in the results the first three lines have the first three arguments to XCOPY   So  the first line has the tree name of the directory to be copied  the  source   the second line has the tree name of the directory to get the copies  the  destination   and the third line has the options for XCOPY   The remaining 1-2 lines have the results of the run of XCOPY   One big point about the options is that options  X and  O result in result  Access denied   To see this  compare case 8 with the other cases that were the same  did not have  X and  O  but did copy   These experiments have me better understand XCOPY and contribute an answer to the original question           case 1                     k  software dir time-date    k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 1   options    E  F  G  H  K  O  R  V  X  Y Result   Invalid path Result   0 File s  copied         case 2                     k  software dir time-date     k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 2   options    E  F  G  H  K  O  R  V  X  Y Result   Access denied Result   0 File s  copied         case 3                     k  software dir time-date   k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 3   options    E  F  G  H  K  O  R  V  X  Y Result   Access denied Result   0 File s  copied         case 4                     k  software dir time-date    k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 4   options    E  F  G  H  K  R  V  Y Result   Invalid path Result   0 File s  copied         case 5                     k  software dir time-date    k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 5   options    E  F  G  H  K  O  R  S  X  Y Result   Invalid path Result   0 File s  copied         case 6                     k  software dir time-date   k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 6   options    E  F  G  H  I  K  O  R  S  X  Y Result   Access denied Result   0 File s  copied         case 7                     k  software dir time-date   k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 7  options    E  F  G  H  I  K  R  S  Y Result   20 File s  copied         case 8                     k  software dir time-date   k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 8  options    E  F  G  H  I  K  O  R  S  X  Y Result   Access denied Result   0 File s  copied         case 9                     k  software dir time-date   k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 9  options    I  S Result   20 File s  copied         case 10                     k  software dir time-date   k  software xcopy002 test xcopy002 test dirs output sub dir 10  options    E  I  S Result   20 File s  copied

User · Answer

if you have xcopy  you can use the  E param  which will copy directories and subdirectories and the files within them  including maintaining the directory structure for empty directories  xcopy  source   destination   E

User · Answer

For Folder Copy You can Use  robocopy C  Source D  Destination  E   For File Copy  copy D  Sourcefile txt D  backup Destinationfile txt  Y    Delete file in some folder last modify date more than some day  forfiles -p  D  FolderPath  -s -m    Filetype eg-- gt  txt  -d - Numberof dates  -c  cmd  c del  PATH    And you can Shedule task in windows perform this task automatically in specific time

[windows] batch/bat to copy folder and content at once

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