How to use robocopy with a large number of excluded files

robocopy

I want to use robocopy to move a large number of files, except those that are in a whitelist. The whitelist contains approximately 150 files of different names. When I copy-and-paste the whitelist's filenames into the command line (using the /xf parameter), robocopy truncates the list.

c:\test> robocopy src dest *.ext /xf exclude1.ext exclude2.ext exclude3.ext ... exclude 299.ext exclude300.ext

Results in:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   ROBOCOPY     ::     Robust File Copy for Windows

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Started : Fri May 24 14:09:31 2013

   Source : C:\test\src\
     Dest : C:\test\dest\

    Files : *.ext

Exc Files : exclude1.ext
            exclude2.ext
            exclude3.ext
            ....
            ....
            exclude200.ext
            exclude201.ext
            exclu

and then:

'exclude250.ext' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
'exclude251.ext' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
'exclude252.ext' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
'exclude253.ext' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Unfortunately the files in the whitelist are hand-picked and can't be filtered by wildcards.

Is there a way to get around this?

Best Answer

There is a limit on command line length (I think it is something like 2048 characters) in windows.

You should generate a job file with a small subset of the exclusion list specified (using the /save:filename argument) to get the syntax, edit the file to include the full list, and then use the /job:filename argument to run it.

For reference, the documentation for this tool can be found here.

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