I have to convert a batch script to PowerShell. I came across these few lines of code and I have no idea what they do. Could someone explain it, especially the echo statements and robocopy?
set logdir=D:\Internal\Log
set runlog=%logdir%\run.log
set roboexe=robocopy /NJH /XX /NP
echo ^<!-- 1>>%runlog% 2>&1
echo Move-Copy - %account% %Time:/=% 1>>%runlog% 2>&1
echo Found files for %account% IN 1>>%runlog% 2>&1
%roboexe% "%fromdir%" "%historydir%" %wildcard% 1>>%runlog%
echo in shell just prints output to the screen. The command also works in PowerShell, but it's really an alias of Write-Output, which sends output to the standard success stream/pipeline (which if there's nowhere else for it to go, is the console/screen by default).
Robocopy is an advanced copying utility. It has a range of abilities beyond the standard copy function of Windows. It is documented here.
To explain the tokens in this line:
echo ^<!-- 1>>%runlog% 2>&1
<, >, and >> are redirection operators. The ^ character escapes the < character so that it's being used literally rather than as a redirect. !-- are also just being printed literally I believe.
1>> is using the append redirect to send the append the standard output to file specified in %runlog%.
2>&1 redirects the error output stream to the standard output stream, so basically errors would also be written to the runlog.
