Wildcard directory exclusions with robocopy — weird case

robocopy

I need to get robocopy to exclude any file whose path contains a directory with a particular name. For example, "bar":

c:\foo\bar\a.txt
c:\bar\c.txt
d:\baz\bar\flub\d.txt

should be excluded, but not

c:\foo\barf\b.txt

Here are the things I tried — each of which was rejected by robocopy:

/XD \bar\
/XD *\bar\*
/XD *^\bar^\*

Any ideas?

Best Answer

Turns out the /XD matches on the directory name -- not the full path. So you don't actually have to worry about matching the backslashes.

So to exclude directories (anywhere in the path) called "bar", a simple /XD bar will work. If you wanted to exclude "barf", too, you could use /XD bar*.

Sometimes the answer is simpler than you think.

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