CertiGuide to A+ (Operating Systems)  9  Chapter 0011:  DOS       9  V  File-Related DOS Commands

Roots 1 VI  Summary

Did you notice the statement that a folder has to be empty to run RD? Sometimes this was a real pain if there were several sub folders running under the first sub folder. You had to go to each folder and DEL *.* and confirm with a Y(YES) to empty each folder before you could RD(REMOVE DIRECTORY). Later versions of DOS acquired the command DELTREE that could delete a folder and all its sub folders even if they had data in them. (And still later versions of Windows, like Windows 2000, did away with DELTREE, sadly enough).

Copying data from different folders and sub folders was as equally painful as attempting to delete old data. Each folder within a folder had to have a CD command to the folder or called expressly by its structure to be copied.

To address this, XCCOPY was created. XCOPY is external to COMMAND.COM.

XCOPY is fast, and has a very cool switch, which is the /S switch. When you use XCOPY it is capable of copying contents (complete with wildcard arguments.). XCOPY/S does the same thing, however is will perform the same function on all sub directories.

As you may recall, XCOPY is not without its problems when used as a backup utility for your entire system. It is still quite convenient to use when just copying folders (“directory hierarchies”) around on disk.

8 Practice Drive XCOPY & XCOPY/S

Roots 1 VI  Summary