Move nested folders and files to new location using a batch file

Question

I have 200 users whose files and folders all reside in a random number of nested folders and files in their user area on our server. The only guarantee is that each user has the following three folders. My Music , My Pictures , My Videos .

I would like to write a batch file that moves:

H:\\My Music (and all its contents) to H:\\Music

H:\\My Pictures (and all its contents) to H:\\Pictures

H:\\My Videos (and all its contents) to H:\\Video

And finally all their remaining files and folders to the following to H:\\Documents

I have been fiddling with the following command and although it works and traverses the whole nested folder structure, it is limited to files and folder without spaces . I assume I need to add a token delims statement, but I can't get the syntax right.

FOR /f %%a IN ('dir "H:\My Music" /b') DO MOVE H:\My Music\%%a H:\Documents\Music

FOR /f %%a IN ('dir "H:\My Pictures" /b') DO MOVE H:\My Pictures\%%a H:\Documents\Pictures

FOR /f %%a IN ('dir "H:\My Videos" /b') DO MOVE H:\My Videos\%%a H:\Documents\Videos

FOR /f %%a IN ('dir "H:" /b') DO MOVE H:\%%a H:\Documents

How do I deal with the spaces in the file and folder names?

I know I can achieve this with XCOPY, but space is an issue. More importantly time is extremely limited. I intend to get all users to run this script, during a 30 minute training session. With most users having several GB's of files XCOPY would take more time than is available during a 30 minute session.

Answer 1

You can simplifu your code like this :

@echo off&cls
set "$Drive=h:\"
set "$folder=music Pictures Videos"

for %%a in (%$folder%) do echo MOVE "%$DRIVE%my %%a" "%$drive%Documents\%%a"
pause

I put an echo before the move that you can test if tje output is ok for you

Answer 2

You need to put quotes around names that contain spaces.

Something like this should work:

FOR /f %%a IN ('dir "H:\My Music" /b') DO MOVE "H:\My Music\%%a" H:\Documents\Music

FOR /f %%a IN ('dir "H:\My Pictures" /b') DO MOVE "H:\My Pictures\%%a" H:\Documents\Pictures

FOR /f %%a IN ('dir "H:\My Videos" /b') DO MOVE "H:\My Videos\%%a" H:\Documents\Videos

FOR /f %%a IN ('dir "H:" /b') DO MOVE "H:\%%a" H:\Documents