It's ages since I needed to use DOS, and I'm afraid I'm a bit rusty - hope someone can help.

I have a list of files that I want to copy from ONE directory to another (about 6000 of them) - format is 003as.txt 003dhei.txt etc.

The source directory contains other files I don't wish to copy, so wildcards won't do the job, but according to copy/? 'source' is the file or files you wish to copy. I'm sure I'm missing something fairly simple here, but after hours of searching, I can't find an EXAMPLE of the syntax to copy multiple (specified) files from one directory to another.

I've tried this:
copy 003as.txt 003dhei.txt ..\otherdirectory
and all sorts of permutations with quotes, commas, etc. to no avail. I'm planning to use the list I have to BUILD a simple batch file containing that command.

Any assistance greatly appreciated.What do you call simple?
A 100 line program you can do in TWENTY minutes ?
Or a 3 line program you can get done in two days?
in the directory you are working with do this
DIR *.*
That gives everything.Now do
DIR *.* >list.txt
Now edit the file'list.txt with notepad or whatever.
Put a @ at the start of every line.
The replace every @ with 'copy ' (not the quotes, but include a space.)
Now put a %1 at the end of every line. Leav a space.
While you are doing that, delete the files you do not want copied.
You will have something like this:

copy mylov.mp3 %1
copy mylove.db %1
copy myhouse.wav %1
copy myhorse.jpg %1

save the the file as 'list.bat'

The do this
list \mybackup

the files will be copied to the \mybackup directory

You can down that maybe faster that I could.
And yes, there is some other neat cool ways to do that, but you can take days to get it right.
Your choice.



a for loop could be used to iterate each line of OUTPUT from a dir /b:

Quote

@echo off

for /f "tokens=*" %%i in ('dir /b %1') do xcopy %%i %3 /EXCLUDE:%2