Robocopy - Include directories (as opposed to Include files) option?

Question

Hello,
I would like to copy only a given set of directories using robocopy. How can this be achieved? Is there an option that I am missing?
Details of my requirement:
- I already use robocopy to sync a large number of binary files. I use robocopy obviously because I want to copy only the files that are changed since the last copy. (something like rsync)
- Almost always I can run the robocopy on the top level directory. But once in a while (very infrequently), I need to copy a few files (~100 files) from 3-4 directories. I do not want to copy anything else. Again, not all files within these 3-4 directories have changed. But I know that the files that have changed are within these directories. So again using robocopy will be ideal because it will detect and copy only the changed files.
From what I see so far, there is no way to provide just these directory names to robocopy and copy the appropriate files. I will have to loop through these directories and then robocopy individual files. Is that correct? Or is there an option in robocopy that can achieve this?
Many thanks,
-Hari

Answer 1

Hello Bill,
Thank you very much for the quick response.
Yes, that is an option. I am trying to avoid making wholesale changes to the script that I currently have and that is why I was desperately looking for a robocopy option that takes files/dirs to include. I guess I should give more details to explain why it will require wholesale changes.
We already have a script that goes through various processing and does something like this at the end:
robocopy MySourceDir MyDestDir /E /XD <...>
Here MySourceDir and MyDestDir are top level directories. So far the script's work (before it executes robocopy) has been to determine the MySourceDir and MyDestDir (where to push to, which branch should the files come from etc..) and also what files to exclude.
The requirement that I mentioned above (need to copy certain directories only) came in now. And an additional point that I missed is that along with the certain number of directories, a few top level files can make it to the list as well.
This essentially means that I will need to
(a) write a section to first identify if its a file or a directory
(b) then create an appropriate robocopy command, depending on if its a file or a directory
(c) in addition, the file in question can be there in any number of sub-directories. For example, I might have a hari.xml file at the top level + a couple of sub-directories. But I just want the hari.xml at the top to go out. Since the file syntax of robocopy does not take the path (AFAIK), it gets a bit more complicated.
In order to avoid all these, I was looking for an option where robocopy will just take an include pattern of sorts (just like rsync's --include or --include-file options).
It looks like I will have to rework the script quite a bit to get this done. But just wanted to check in here in this forum to see if there is a better solution out there.
thanks,
-Hari