Using xcopy in batch file for backup in Win 7 & Win 10

[KeithGeorge]

Good Morning,

I have been using xcopy in a batch file now for several years without any problems.

The command I am using is:- xcopy/y  "S:\Documents"  "G:\Documents"   /e /d

What I would like to do, when I run the batch on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday then
  xcopy/y "S:\Documents"  "G:\DocumentsMWF"   /e /d        and on the other days of the week it should be
  xcopy/y  "S:\Documents"  "G:\DocumentsTTSS"   /e /d

So I end up with 2 copies, one a day older than the other.

[nil]

Windows has a %DATE% environment variable, but it is notoriously unreliable because the format can change based on registry settings

Instead, you can get the day of the week as a number using wmic. You can extract the number from the wmic output using for /f and findstr.

From the command line:

Code: [Select]

for /f "skip=1" %a in ('wmic path win32_localtime get dayofweek ^| findstr /r /v "^$"') do @set DOW=%a


The number is from 0-6 (0 for sunday, 6 for saturday).

To use this in a batch script, just replace %a with %%a.

whats going on here -

• for /f operates on all lines of a command's output, in this case everything single quoted in the parentheses
• "skip=1" tells for /f to ignore the first line of the output (wmic outputs "DayOfWeek" on the first line)
• To exclude blank lines in the wmic output from being processed by for /f, we pipe (^|) the wmic command to findstr, which uses a regular expression (/r) and excludes all matches (/v). The regular expression is "^$", which matches any line containing exactly "beginning of line, end of line, and nothing in between". This will match any blank line and exclude it.

more info -

for: https://www.computerhope.com/forhlp.htm
wmic: https://www.computerhope.com/wmic.htm
findstr: https://www.computerhope.com/findstr.htm
regular expressions: https://www.computerhope.com/unix/regex-quickref.htm

hope this helps