Using xxcopy to copy files from subdirectories to one directory and combine- Life of a Geek Admin

Sep 8, 2012 Posted by newlife007 on Sep 8, 2012 in Windows | 0 comments

Using xxcopy to copy files from subdirectories to one directory and combine

Ever wanted to copy files in sub-directories into a single directory? Well there’s a handy utility for Windows systems called xxcopy that does this and more.

What is XXCOPY ?

A versatile file management tool for Microsoft Windows®.
It is a command-line program (without graphical user interface).
Supports all Windows versions (except Windows CE).
It has more command switches (>230) than any other tool of its kind.
An ideal component for batch files for simple and complex scripting.
Accesses remote (networked) computer storage and local external USB drives.
Command syntax compatible with Microsoft’s XCOPY with few exceptions.
Competes with (supersedes) Microsoft’s RoboCopy.
One download package contains both the 32-bit and 64-bit XXCOPY versions.
Extremely rich in file-selection mechanism (by filedate, size, attrib, etc.).
Wild-Wildcard (specify a path with wildcard anywhere for any number of times).
Functions for Copy, List, Gather, Delete, Move, Flatten-Dir, and more …

For this post I wanted to show a quick way to gather files from sub-directories with a single command.

To install xxcopy, download from http://www.xxcopy.com/xcpymain.htm. The latest version is 3.11.2. Unzip and double-click on install.bat. By default it will install to c:\windows\system32 and put 2 shortcuts on your desktop.

The main objective was to copy all the text files from the C:\FileCol directory on myserver and combine the contents of those files into a single file. This is done by using xxcopy and copy commands.

First lets use xxcopy to get the files to a single location. In this case I have files in sub-directories to retrieve, xxcopy has the /sg switch which gathers files into one-level directory and Copies directories and sub-directories except empty ones.

So the syntax is:
xxcopy /sg location_of_files destination

Example:
xxcopy /sg \\myserver\c$\FileCol\*.txt c:\temp\admin

Now that we have our files wecan use the copy command to combine all the contents into one file.

cd c:\temp\admin copy *.txt Administrators.txt

All done. You can do much more with xxcopy. Feel free to explore the long list of command parameters http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy01.htm and the cookbook here http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy11.htm