Comments on: Using the FOR command to copy files listed in a text file

By: Adrian

Adrian — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:48:35 +0000

Thank you very much for such a useful script, i’ve been looking for it for 2 days, but i have a problem

in my filelist.txt i have listed a lot of files with special characters, like á é í ó ú so it keeps telling

me file not found because it cannot read any of those characters, is there any way to fix this problem?

i really need to get over this, i have like 10 files listing me 200 files each one, it would take me

years to do it manually :S

By: PatrickMc

PatrickMc — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:46:42 +0000

Nice problem and solution. Can a scripting langugage such as biterscripting make the task easy ? Here is a script.

# Script CopyFiles.txt
var str src, dest, list, file
cat “/path/to/list file.txt” > $list
lex “1″ $list > $file
while ($file “”)
do
system copy (“\”"+$src+”/”+$file) (“\”"+$dest+”/”+$file)
lex “1″ $list > $file
done

This script is in biterscripting ( http://www.biterscripting.com ). Save the script in file C:/Scripts/CopyFiles.txt. Call the script using the following command.

script “C:/Scripts/CopyFiles.txt” src(“/path/to/source folder”) dest(“/path/to/destination folder”)

By: brian

brian — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:52:59 +0000

If your filelist.txt has the full path to the files, you need to do two things:

1. Remove any path prefix to the source parameter of the xcopy command.
2. Remove the first slash in the UNC path in the destination parameter of the xcopy command.

Fortunately the command shell in Windows allows you to specify a substring of characters from a variable (called string indexing, see http://www.dostips.com/DtTipsStringManipulation.php). If the variable %i was your full UNC path, and you want to drop the first character (so you don’t have a double-slash in your path), you can specify %i:~1 — the :~1 says “start from the second character” (strings are zero-indexed, so the first character is at position 0, the second at position 1, etc.).

Your command line can then be:

for /f “delims=” %%i in (filelist.txt) do ( set fil=%%i
echo D|xcopy “%%i” “c:\temp\%fil:~1%” /i /z /y )

You have to set a temporary variable (“fil” in the above), since as far as I can tell string indexing doesn’t work with the %%i for loop variable.

By: Lester

Lester — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:03:33 +0000

Hi,

How I have a problem, the filelist.txt that i’ve created constains different locations (server locations),
\\server1\temp1
\\server2\temp2
\\server3\temp3
Can this be done using your batch file?

thanks,

By: Joel Eade

Joel Eade — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:38:31 +0000

You’ve saved me sooo much time! “Thank You” can’t begin to explain my gratitude. You’re awesome

By: David Lim

David Lim — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:37:15 +0000

Brian,

You are a genius! I have been trying to do this all night without success and am glad that I found this site. Thank you!!!

Keep up the good work.

David

By: Sari

Sari — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:55:05 +0000

Thanks Brian! This was exactly what I was trying to do. Years ago I did a lot with DOS batch files and now I can not remember how to do it since dragging and dropping everything.
I modified your example a bit to create a text file listing files, which were not found.

By: Josh

Josh — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:23:25 +0000

Tried copy and it just bombed out. I then put a pause at the end of the batch file so I could see exactly what it was doing. The issue with the xcopy wound up being that it was set for Directory instead of File so I changed D| to F| before the xcopy thus making the script:

for /f “delims=” %%I in (test.txt) do echo F| xcopy “C:\Documents and Settings\e1000721\Desktop\New\%%I” “C:\Copy\%%I”

Thanks again for the great help.

By: brian

brian — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 02:13:27 +0000

Try replacing xcopy with a regular copy command — it might do the trick. (For some reason xcopy is defaulting to behavior assuming that the destination is a directory, not a file. Usually this only happens when the /I switch is present.)

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:29:07 +0000

I appear to be having the same issue as Joe.

Before running this in my live environment, I decided to test it first.

My bat file states:
for /f “delims=” %%I in (test.txt) do echo D| xcopy “C:\Documents and Settings\e1000721\Desktop\New\%%I” “C:\Copy\%%I”

My test.txt file states
Level\test\File1.txt
Level\test\File2.txt
test\File3.txt
test\File4.txt

And it does copy over fine, only when it finishes, the file structure appears as
C:\Copy\Level\test\File1.txt\File2.txt
C:\Copy\Level\test\File2.txt\File2.txt
C:\Copy\test\File3.txt\File3.txt
C:\Copy\test\File4.txt\File4.txt

Any thoughts on how I can get it to not make the last subfolder the name of the file?

Thanks.