Talk:XCOPY

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Contents 1 Another xcopy 2 Visual Studio 3 Copyit.bat 4 howto information 5 copy commands

[edit] Another xcopy

xcopy was also a GUI based disk duplication program for the earlier Amiga Systems. It allowed the copy of non standard amiga formatted disks and got around a lot of copy protection people put on their games.

[edit] Visual Studio

How about XCOPY installation? Should that go here, or in Visual Studio, or what? --Uncle Ed 17:42, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyit.bat

The "copyit.bat" appears to have been copied from this microsoft web site, I am removing it:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/xcopy.mspx?mfr=true

Concavelenz 18:52, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] howto information

Wikipedia is a not a manual. I've removed this again (along with the output of "help xcopy" on the talk page, which was borderline copyvio). Articles should describe their subjects, not explain how to use them. Chris Cunningham 11:45, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

The Command Options section shows a history of the different commands, at which point they were implemented and describes them. It is not a howto. Your removal of this section lessens the value of this article in my opinion.

Also you've removed the usage format. That's like cutting out the formula E=MC² from Einstein's theory of relativity. Showing the usage format of any command line program like this is essential for reference. It is not howto. I suggest this be restored as well. NipponBill 01:53, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

The same arguments could be used for basically any howto section which wasn't overtly prescriptive. It's possible to describe how a program works without a sprawling list of the arguments it takes; have a look at chdir, for instance. Chris Cunningham 09:31, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you could explain how how the historical reference and usage fit into the howto concept. According to the How-to page: "A how-to' or a howto is an informal, often short, description of how to accomplish some specific task." NipponBill 09:47, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

My apologies. I'm referring to template:howto when I say "howto", not to the concept. The "historical reference" you talk about is a rather obtuse way of describing the notes that certain flags aren't available on certain OS releases; as I said, I wouldn't have a problem with this being presented as an actual history section, but there's no need to keep a list of usage flags. Wikipedia is not a manual, and describing what each function does is what a manual is for. We wouldn't lose anything by adding a reference to a Microsoft site which contained this information instead of providing it ourselves. Chris Cunningham 10:08, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Regardless, it's still not a how-to or a manual to show the usage format.

Would you be able to suggest a way that we could construct a historical section, perhaps re-purposing some of the information you removed, in a way that would be acceptable? NipponBill 01:41, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

A usage format is only useful when one needs to use the program, and it's basically just a copy of the program output. I've still got the page on my watchlist; I'll see what I can do in readding the historical info. Chris Cunningham 13:49, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] copy commands

Unix/*nix programs (Also sometimes used in Windows versions)

• cp -- copy files; can concatenate files
• cpio -- copy an entire directory structure from one place to another
• cat -- concatenate and display files
• dd -- copy streams, files, or devices in whole or part
• head -- display/copy the first part of a file
• tail -- display/copy the last part of a file

DOS/Windows programs (Seldom used in *nix versions)

• COPY -- copy files or sets of files, binary or text mode, can concatenate files
• XCOPY -- eXtended version of COPY, for copying file structures
• XXCOPY -- further extended commercial program
• ROBOCOPY -- further extended version, included in Vista

Other specialized programs are used to split large files into pieces and then put the pieces back together.

There are no good standard programs to extract an arbitrary piece of a file into another file. dd can be used, but requires setting blocksize to 1, which is very inefficient. In Windows, the obscure program CPART can be used.

grep and awk are powerful *nix programs for looking for patterns in a file. -69.87.200.198 00:36, 17 October 2007 (UTC)