Copy multiple folders to a single destination with robocopy

Question

I'm looking for a solution to use robocopy to copy several folders from a directory onto a distant network share. I want to choose several folders out of a directory that contains hundreds of folders I'm not interested in. I want to do something similar to scp in linux using regex, but this doesn't work in robocopy:

c:\robocopy "c:\results\1319_TC1.*" "\\datastore\somefolder\"

Answer 1

Try this one:

gci C:\results\1319_TC1.* | foreach-object { robocopy $_.fullname (".\datastore\somefolder\" + $_.name) }

gci C:\results\1319_TC1.* get's all matching files/directories first and puts them through the pipe where foreach-object takes care of all results from the first command. It'll robocopy the fullpath of each result (full path to your result-directories) and put them into .\datastore\somefolder\ with its original foldername e.g.:
C:\results\1319_TC1.123456 -> C:\results\datastore\somefolder\1319_TC1.123456

That thing in braces will put that target-directory-name and the original folder-name together.

Edit:
I just saw that your target-directory should be a UNC-path. Robocopy accepts UNC-paths (even with path-names longer than 256 characters). You just have to replace (".\datastore\somefolder\" with ("\\datastore\somefolder\" in my command. So the right command would be:

gci C:\results\1319_TC1.* | foreach-object { robocopy $_.fullname ("\\datastore\somefolder\" + $_.name) }

Answer 2

You would do it in a batch file. You will need on line per directory.

In the alternative, you could do this, which would copy everything and then delete the excess if that is easier: Robocopy z:\directory d:\directory /MIR /COPYALL (Caution: MIR is for mirror image and will overwrite anything in its way, so use only on a blank directory).

Answer 3

You will not be able to do this with Robocopy alone. If you have access to a linux machine, it would be trivially easy using find with the -exec option. Or you could use cygwin on windows (I would guess it has the find command), or you could use a scripting language like Ruby or Python on Windows.

Answer 4

A quick powershell like this:

$Dir = get-childitem "c:\results\"  -recurse
$List = $Dir | where {$_.FullName -match "1319_TC1."}
$List | split-path FullName -parent | get-unique

Will give you a list of all files that are in a folder that matches "1319_TC1." Then all you need to do robocopy each of those folders.