Re: Batch files

it's not the length of the filename/path that's the problem, it's the space. filenames/paths with spaces needs to be in quotes.

-Lasse

If you are using XP you can enclose the pathname in quotes and use the long filenames like the GUI environment does. I wrote a backup batch files that does that, and it works nicely. If not the easy way to remember is to limit the characters to the first 6 then add the ~1 to the end. If the sixth character is a space, then it becomes the first character of the next word. So "my documents" becomes "mydocu~1" and "myfiles" will not change at all, but "my files" will become "myfile~1". If the first 6 characters of the next item are the same then the end get the ~2 and so on.

- Tim -

I thought it would be handy to see the actual xcopy command I used in the batch file.

xcopy "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Tim\\My Documents" "q:\\timback\\My Documents" /s/v/h/e/i/r/o/x/y

That command copied the contents of the "My Documents" folder to drive Q, created the folder (timback was previously created), and verified the copy.

The final version had several of these lines to complete a backup system for a customer. It was very fast and easy for them to use, so backups now get done regularly.

- Tim -