Bat file that copies files from a folder with changing name as YYYYMMDD

Question

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I need to schedule a bat file that copies files from a folder whose name changes daily and I need to copy those from yesterday's folder. I.e. if today is feb 12, 2010 I need to copy files from folder 20100211 and tomorrow I will need to copy from folder 20100212.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

In batch file this is near to impossible since you cannot choose format. However, if you have PowerShell on this machine, you could use Get-Date:

$now = get-date -format yyyyMMddTHHmmss
$fileName = $now + "_something.txt"
Copy-Item $source -Destination $fileName

Answer 2

Would it suffice to keep the parent directory of these YYYYMMDD directories synced to another directory? That way, you wouldn't have to worry about the name changes. Robocopy is a great command-line tool for mirroring one directory to another. It became one of the standard commands as of Vista. If you're still using XP, you can get it as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. If you don't want everything in the parent directory copied, you can specify files and/or directories to ignore in a robocopy job file.

Answer 3

Here is a batch script that will copy files from C:/FromFolder/yyyymmdd to C:/ToFolder (yyyymmdd is yesterday's date).

# Script CopyYesterday.txt
var str yesterday, list, file
set $yesterday = addtime(diff("-1000000"))   # "-1000000" = subtract 1 day, 00 hrs, 00 mins, 00 secs
chex "8]" $yesterday > $yesterday
# We now want to copy files from C:/FromFolder/$yesterday to C:/ToFolder.
lf -n "*" ("C:/FromFolder/"+$yesterday) ($ftype=="f") > $list
while ($list <> "")
do
    lex "1" $list > $file
    system -s "copy /Y" ("\""+$file+"\"") "C:/ToFolder"
done

Copy and save the script in file C:/Script/CopyYesterday.txt. Then schedule this command to run daily.

"C:/biterScripting/biterScripting.exe" "C:/Script/CopyYesterday.txt"

You will need to install biterscripting ( http://www.biterscripting.com ). It is great for flexible file management. The help pages for addtime, lf command etc, are at their site or you can also do "help addtime", etc. in biterscripting.