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Asked: 2026-05-17T18:05:50+00:00

I’m trying to write a simple backup script in Ruby that copies a folder

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I’m trying to write a simple backup script in Ruby that copies a folder to a specific directory with a timestamp in its name.
My code is (simplified):

require 'Fileutils.rb'
time = Time.now
FileUtils.cp_r "C:/somefolder", "D:/somefolder_backup_#{time}"

But I keep getting

`fu_mkdir': Unknown error - mkdir failed (SystemCallError)

The same happens if I simply want to create a folder with the current time in it:

FileUtils.mkdir "C:/somefolder_#{time}"

It doesn’t seem to be a privileges issue, if I leave out the #{time}-thing it works perfectly.

Any advices are appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    My guess is that there is a character in your time string that Windows doesn’t allow in a directory name (your code works fine for me on my Ubuntu machine). Try formatting your time so that it’s just numeric, and that’ll probably work:

    require 'Fileutils.rb'
time = Time.now.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M%S")
FileUtils.cp_r "C:/somefolder", "D:/somefolder_backup_#{time}"
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