I love DOS. I've never fallen away from the idea that using DOS is the neatest way to move or copy files from one directory to another. It is so powerful. I just learned, thanks to the How to Geek newsletter, that you can drag and drop a folder into a DOS window to avoid typing long directories.
Oh my God!
Years ago, I used code like this:
XCOPY \\Dir1\Dir2\Dir3\Dir4\File_name1.PDF c:\dir1\dir2\dir3\dir4\dir5\dir6
XCOPY \\Dir1\Dir2\Dir3\Dir4\File_name2.PDF c:\dir1\dir2\dir3\dir4\dir5\dir6
XCOPY \\Dir1\Dir2\Dir3\Dir4\File_name3.PDF c:\dir1\dir2\dir3\dir4\dir5\dir6
and have, literally, hundreds of lines like that. The more I analyze this newly discovered information, the more I realize it would have been awesome to know, but not useful for the situation. The reason I had to copy individual files into the dir6 was that I had PDFs in Dir4 that had no business going into dir6. The files in dir6 were for distribution to end-users and some of the PDFs in dir4 were internal only. Unfortunately, I don't think this information is as awesome as I started out thinking it would be. I can't envision dragging / dropping the folders into the DOS window and then copying them to my batch file editor (Notepad) as very helpful either.
But who knows - I may have sought to have a directory structure within Dir4 of "internal" v. "external" and avoid the lines of code I ended up using to do what I needed to do. In any case, I posted the following to Facebook and, thus far, two friends have liked it: a high school classmate and Matthew in LCR:*
If you were enrolled in the Old School of DOS and know what I mean when I say XCOPY commands are very powerful with the /s attribute, you may want to read this article. It's 2014 but learning neat tricks about DOS never gets old: http://www.howtogeek.com/179031/drag-and-drop-files-and-folders-to-auto-complete-a-command-line/
*I'm not going to keep a running list, though, of who likes it.
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