Question

I’m writing a shell script to backup the contents of the current directory to a timestamped subdirectory, ./STATES/$DATE. Obviously I do not want to STATES directory itself to be re-copied each time I backup the folder, so I need to somehow exclude it from the copy.

Here’s an untested shell script showing how I’d approach this on *nix:

ID="$(date +%Y%b%d%H%M%S)"
COMMITABLE="$(ls | egrep --invert-match ^STATES\$)"
STATE_PATH="$(pwd)/STATES/$ID"
mkdir --parents "$STATE_PATH"
cp $COMMITABLE "$STATE_PATH"
ln -s "$STATE_PATH" PARENT

How could I achieve this in a batch file?

Answer 1

xcopy‘s /exclude:$FILE option can be used to specify a file containing filenames to be ignored. A friend of mine converted the script to batch like this:

@echo off
set thedate=%date:~0,2%-%date:~3,2%-%date:~6,4%
md %thedate%
echo STATES > excludefile.txt
echo excludefile.txt >> excludefile.txt
xcopy <root folder of directory structure> %thedate% /e /i /exclude:excludefile.txt
del excludefile.txt