CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

Pruning and Grafting Folder Trees
There’s a number of situations where you find yourself wanting to grab a
folder, complete with all of the subfolders and any files that might be
anywhere in any of the folders, and copy or move the whole “pile” in one
command. We call this process pruning and grafting and it’s one of the
places where the command line really shines in comparison to GUI file
manipulation. Done properly, command-line pruning and grafting is faster
and gives you much finer control of the process.
In Windows, the standard copy and move commands can work only in one
directory at a time, making them a poor choice for copying or moving files in
multiple directories. To help with these multi-directory jobs, Microsoft added
the xcopy command. (Note that there is no xmove, only xcopy.) We’ll also
look at robocopy, cp, and mv.
xcopy
The xcopy command functions similarly to copy, but xcopy has extra
switches that give it the power to work with multiple directories. Here’s how
it does that. Let’s say I have a directory called Logs in the root of my C:
drive. The Logs directory has three subdirectories: Jan, Feb, and Mar. All of
these directories, including the Logs directory, contain about 50 files. If I
wanted to copy all of these files to my E: drive in one command, I would use
xcopy in the following manner:
xcopy c:\Logs e:\Logs /s
Because xcopy works on directories, you don’t have to use filenames as
you would in copy, although xcopy certainly accepts filenames and
wildcards. The /s switch, the most commonly used of all of the many
switches that come with xcopy, tells xcopy to copy all subdirectories except
for empty ones. The /e switch tells xcopy to copy empty subdirectories.
When you have a lot of copying to do over many directories, xcopy is the
tool to use.
robocopy
Microsoft introduced the robocopy command—short for Robust File Copy—