Powershell copy file directory structure

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See you tomorrow. Until then, peace. Comments are closed. I enjoyed this very much. Thank you. Show 2 more comments. Otherwise it copies the files to the root of that target directory. Strange home MS does things.

Thanks — dim. Perfect answer! I tried this and if the destination container does not exist, this will only transfer the files without folders which contradicts what the documentation says for the Copy-Item. The only solution I have found is to create the target folder before performing the Copy-Item cmdlet.

Joey Joey k 80 80 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. I know but I'd like to do that in powershell because that's a part of a bigger script and I'm going to pipe the output of copy using -PassThru to other commands. ZacharyYates: You can use xcopy to use xcopy from PowerShell. Length If! Contains '. Adam Caviness Adam Caviness 3, 31 31 silver badges 37 37 bronze badges. This seems the most useful PS answer as it takes care of creating folders that do not exist, which is a common requirement and many other answers are ignoring.

Works with PowerShell 5. Rafael Costa Rafael Costa 3 3 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. This appears to be the same solution previously provided by workabyte. The Container switch to Copy-Item maintain the folder structure. I read the answer but it seemed convoluted so i moved on looking for another solution coming back i see that its the same solution i found but not as clear as it could be.

This was what I was looking for thanks. Providing a pattern match of some kind would make it better. LastWriteTime -gt [datetime]::Now. I doubt this will work in powershell - it is a batch file — Serhii Kheilyk. Please don't post only code as answer, but also provide an explanation what your code does and how it solves the problem of the question.

Answers with an explanation are usually more helpful and of better quality, and are more likely to attract upvotes — Tyler2P. This is the solution I chose and it worked.

The author's original question also requires to filter parent folders that contain specifically named child folders, which this does not address. Here's a oneliner to do this. Please note that the destination file will have the same filename as the source file. I had files in a single folder in Windows 7 that I wanted to rename and copy to nonexistent folders. If the destination file path does not exist, the function creates an empty file in that path, forcing the creation of any nonexistent directories in the file path.

If Copy-Item can do all that by itself, I could not see how to do it from the documentation. It is coming late, but as I stumbled upon this question looking for a solution to a similar problem, the cleanest one I found elsewhere is using robocopy instead of Copy-Item.

I needed to copy the whole file structure together with the files, that's easily achieved via. I have been digging around and found a lot of solutions to this issue, all being some alteration not just a straight copy-item command. Grant it some of these questions predate PS 3. None of the current answers worked for me to fix the Could not find a part of the path error raised by Copy-Item. After some research and testing, I discovered this error can be raised if the Destination path goes over the character Windows path length limit.

What I mean by that is: if you supply a path to the Destination argument of Copy-Item and any of the files you are copying would exceed the character limit when copied to the Destination folder, Copy-Item will raise the Could not find a part of the path error.

How are we doing? Please help us improve Stack Overflow. Take our short survey. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Hello, very nice script — I searched something similar few hours and this help me a lot. Thanks a lot for sharing this stuff. Welcome, fellow system admin. Only before copying the Item I was first creating the folder structure on the Destination path.

Copy-Item Microsoft Powershell.