I am new to scripting world so might be asking some novice question but I did not find the exact code after so much googling.
My requirement is to generate a script to copy X number of files from one folder to another. Here number of files to be copied, source and target folder should be configurable in the script.
I tried Xcopy, Robocopy but in none I found any parameter to restrict the number of files to be copied. The program will run on Win7 or Win2008 server.
Please help.
I must say that I agree with vonPryz here. It seems odd. However it's very easy to do what you need in PowerShell. Just grab the number of items you want using:
$sourceFolder = "D:\source"
$destinationFolder = "D:\copiedfiles"
$maxItems = 200
Get-Childitem $sourceFolder | Select-Object -First $maxItems | Copy-Item $destinationFolder
This will even create the destination folder if it doesn't exist.
For batch-file tag:
@echo off
setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion
set "source=d:\temp\input"
set "target=d:\temp\output"
set num=10
for /F "tokens=1,2 delims=:" %%f in ('dir /b /a-d "%source%\*" ^| findstr /n "^" ') do (
if %%f leq %num% (
copy "%source%\%%g" "%target%" /y > nul
) else goto endCopy
)
:endCopy
endlocal
Discuss with whoever gave the requirement and find out the exact filtering needs.
It makes little if any sense to copy N files from location X to location Y. Usually there is more sensible a criteria, like copy all files that are changed after DATETIME from location X to location Y. If there are more than N files, pick only N oldest/newest. Only the stakeholder can tell you what kind of behaviour is expected. Without more information, the script is very much unlikely to provide the expected functionality.
After you know the exact requirement, do some more Googling for solution. It shouldn't take much effort to find out how to achieve the task in Powershell. Hint: use gci with appropriate parameters/filters and store its results in an array.
Btw... the above PowerShell will throw exception about command not taking pipeline input. You need to copy each object, so the right command is: Get-Childitem $sourceFolder | ForEach-Object {Select-Object -First $maxItems | Copy-Item $destinationFolder}
Copy-Itemtechnet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee156818.aspx