How to copy folders. Am I really this stupid?

April 1, 2006 1:30 PM

I need to move many files in different subfolders to one folder, thousands of images to be precise.

The files are in dozens of folders like this:

C:\pictures\010106\DCIM\101\image0001.jpg
C:\pictures\020106\DCIM\101\image0028.jpg

etc... so one folder for each day as it were. No file has the same name. What's the easy way to copy all the files from their respective subfolder to a single new folder on another disk? I would prefer to do this in DOS to avoid having to manually copy the files from each folder. This should be an easy task, but I really can't figure out how to do this. I searched AskMe and googled but I found nothing for Win XP.

posted by fondle to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Can't you just do a WinXP search (F3 shortcut) in explorer with c:\pictures set as the "Look In" field and *.jpg as the "Search for files" field? After it populates, drag n drop (or whatever) into your new folder? As far as I know, search should recurse through subfolders as well.
posted by pooya at 1:56 PM on April 1, 2006

Yes yes thank you very much! There had to be an easy way.
posted by fondle at 2:02 PM on April 1, 2006

I'm sure there are a hundred ways to do it and probably some easy ones, too.

Unfortunately, all I can think of is writing a script or zipping all the folders up and unzipping the zip so that unzip ignores the directory structure.
posted by callmejay at 2:03 PM on April 1, 2006

Post-preview, never mind. :-)
posted by callmejay at 2:04 PM on April 1, 2006

You already have an answer but you can also do this in windows command prompt:

for /r C:\pictures\ %i in (*.jpg) do move "%i" c:\new_directory

Usually I test these kinds of things first with

for /r C:\pictures\ %i in (*.jpg) do echo not actually moving file: "%i"

This works on NT, windows 2000, and windows XP, but not on 95, 98, and ME, I believe. for /? from the command prompt will tell you more info.
posted by aubilenon at 2:33 PM on April 1, 2006

Previous similar question
posted by Sharcho at 3:23 PM on April 1, 2006

aubilenon, I did not know that command, thanks! :)
posted by fondle at 5:20 PM on April 1, 2006