hi everybody .... ok ...
I have, let say, directory that has files inside like: G:\1999\Jan\ has files file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt . And I also have G:\2000\Jan folder that has only file3.txt . I want to COPY ALL files from G:\1999\Jan\*.* to G:\2000\Jan\ But I DO NOT want to overwirte file3.txt which already exists in G:\2000\Jan folder. SO they question is how to copy all files from one folder to another folder without overwriting existing files AND (here listen very carefully) without giving me a prompt message "Overwrite? Yes, No,ALL". I want to use this command in DOS BATCH file (*.bat) which will work overnite (copy about 30000 files from one to another directory .... and about 1000 files in destination directory already exist and should not be overwritten) and there will be nobody to type "NO" to every "Overwrite??" message.

Thank you every body.

*yawn*

a lot of you should learn the /? switch.
how would I do it?

like this:

attrib \1999\Jan\file3.txt +s +r +h
copy /y \1999\Jan\*.* \2000\Jan
attrib \1999\Jan\file3.txt -s -r -h

the first command hides the file(s) you dont want copied...then copies the rest (/y suppresses the "overwrite" message and makes it overwrite everything) then the last command un-hides the file(s) you didn't want copied.
- W0rm

attrib with just the +r will make it so it aint copied over.

as an extra you can also set up the dos environment variable

set cpycmd= /y

this is the environment variable that copy looks at each time it is run.

also, dir looks at dircmd

a useful thing i normally do is set dircmd=/w
so all directory listings come out in wide format, and it can simply be overrided by adding the switch /-w

thank you guys ... I can not apply first method (as it was suggested) because at the moment of copying I dont know exactly how many files should not be overwritten ... And I can not hide ALL of them (~1000 files in different folders such as G:\2000\Jan or G:\2000\Feb G:\2000\Mar ... etc)
I think for the same reason I can not apply second method too.
But I came up with goood idea myself :o)
this what I will (actually I did already) do:

* create G:\temp folder
* copy all existing files from G:\2000\Jan to G:\TEMP\
* copy all files from G:\1999\Jan to G:\2000\Jan in qiet mode (overwriting existing files)
* and finally copy back existing files from TEMP folder all files to G:\2000\Jan.

So basically what I have in G:\2000\Jan --- existing files (that used to be there before all this s---) are not overwritten + plus files copied from G:\1999\Jan.

:o) Thank you guys for the help

is this a DOS forum? nobody knows that you can just pipe (|) the letter 'n' or any other string to a copy command?????????

enter this command line:

echo n|copy X:\wherever\*.* X:\wherever
^ where this is a pipe character (shift-backslash on most IBM keyboards)

simple.