To: jdashiel AT eagle1 DOT eaglenet DOT com
Cc: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: surprising xcopy behavior
Message-ID: <19970421.174453.4607.1.chambersb@juno.com>
References: <Pine DOT NXT DOT 3 DOT 95 DOT 970421192717 DOT 9081A-100000 AT eagle1>
From: chambersb AT juno DOT com (Benjamin D Chambers)
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 20:38:46 EDT
Precedence: bulk


On Mon, 21 Apr 1997 19:35:06 -0400 (EDT) Jude DaShiell
<jdashiel AT eagle1 DOT eaglenet DOT com> writes:
>
>I was interested in having opendos do an xcopy from
>a floppy to a hard drive and have opendos recreate a
>directory structure on the hard drive which already
>exists on the floppy.
>I tried:
>xcopy /d /s a:\dirname\*.* c: <cr>
                           ^^^^
                       Here's your problem.

When you use c: (or a:, or b:, or anything) the OS assumes you mean the
_current_directory_ on that drive - in this case, c: (not c:\).  If you
wanted to copy to the root directory\dirname, you should have used:
xcopy a:\dirname c:\dirname /E
(unfortunately, I don't know the OD options to use - this will copy the
directory tree for MS6.22)

...Chambers
>and what happened was opendos started dumping files from under
>dirname on a: into the root directory on c:.  Fortunately nothing 
>irrepairable for
>myself but this would be a nasty surprise for a new
>computer user if what I typed was correct for that purpose.
>The xcopy documentation in xcopy help documentation doesn't make much 
>more clear
>than that.
>What should have happened at first was c:\dirname should have been 
>created and
>then the files in that file tree should have copied over.
>
>jude <jdashiel AT eagle1 DOT eaglenet DOT com>
>
>