xcopy wildcard source folder name to destination

Question

I want to copy from a wildcard source folder to a destination folder:

xcopy a:\parentfolder\n* x:\parentfolder

Only folders starting with "n" should therefore be copied to the destination.

Any help to get this working would be much appreciated.

Violinist

So what's wrong with what you've got? If there's an error, post it. Otherwise, state what's working differently than you expect. – Teacup

Is there an error? What doesn't work? – Ettore

I have deleted a few files in the destination folder in order to to test whether the above command will copy the missing files across. Even though I get no error from the above xcopy, the missing files are not copied either. I have also tried the xcopy command as follows: xcopy "E:\parentfolder\N*.*" "N:\parentfolder\" /D /F /I /Y /R – Violinist

Answer 1

for /f "delims=" %%a in ('dir /b/ad "a:\parentfolder\n*" ') do xcopy "a:\parentfolder\%%a\*" x:\parentfolder\

As you have it, XCOPY assumes that n* is a filespec, and there's no way to tell it otherwise.

Smug

Thanks so much Magoo, though it seems there might be a little bug somewhere. I have tried your code a few different ways, but get an error: "%%a was unexpected at this time" – Violinist

Ok, I got it working! :-) It seems the problem was with the double %%a .... ? Changing it to sing le %a did the trick. Thanks Magoo !! :-) – Violinist

The final tweak was the /s switch for xcopy. Hope this is helpful for others. – Violinist

@RenéSchutte The double % is necessary when running this command from a batch file. From the command line you only need a single %, as you discovered. – Marque

@user5428856 - The spces between the switches are optional with dir although I normally use them. The `` between the sourcespec and destination was definitely an error - and one which has been here for more than 18 months! Good spotting! – Smug

Answer 2

If you first CD to the folder you want to copy it will work:

a:
cd \parentfolder
xcopy /s n*.* x:\parentfolder

Dairy