How to copy certain files (w/o folder hierarchy), but do not overwrite existing files?

Question

I need to copy all *.doc files (but not folders whose names match *.doc) from a network folder \\\\server\\source (including files in

Answer 1

The previous answers seem rather overcomplicated to me, unless I'm misunderstanding something. This should work:

Get-ChildItem "\\server\source\" *.doc -Recurse | ?{-not ($_.PSIsContainer -or (Test-Path "C:\Destination\$_"))} | Copy-Item -Destination "C:\Destination"

None of the built-in commands - copy, xcopy, or robocopy - will do what you want on their own, but there's a utility called xxcopy that will, conveniently available at http://www.xxcopy.com. It has a number of built-in options specifically for flattening directory trees into a single directory. The following will do what you described:

xxcopy "\\server\source\*.doc" "C:\Destination" /SGFO

However, xxcopy has various other options for handling duplicate filenames than just copying the first one encountered, such as adding the source directory name to the filename, or adding sequential numerical identifies to all but the first one, or all but the newest or oldest. See this page for details: http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy16.htm