Copy a list (txt) of files

Question

I\'ve seen some scripts examples over SO, but none of them seems to provide examples of how to read filenames from a .txt list.

This example is good, so as to copy a

Answer 1

The following will copy files from a list and preserve the directory structure. Useful when you need to compress files which have been changed in a range of Git/SVN commits¹, for example. It will also deal with spaces in the directory/file names, and works with both relative and absolute paths:

(based on this question: How to expand two local variables inside a for loop in a batch file)

@echo off

setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

set "source=input dir"
set "target=output dir"

for /f "tokens=* usebackq" %%A in ("file_list.txt") do (
    set "FILE=%%A"
    set "dest_file_full=%target%\!FILE:%source%=!"
    set "dest_file_filename=%%~nxA"
    call set "dest_file_dir=%%dest_file_full:!dest_file_filename!=%%"
    if not exist "!dest_file_dir!" (
        md "!dest_file_dir!"
    )
    set "source_file_full=%source%\!FILE:%source%=!"
    copy "!source_file_full!" "!dest_file_dir!"
)
pause

Note that if your file list has absolute paths, you must set source as an absolute path as well.

[¹] if using Git, see: Export only modified and added files with folder structure in Git