Windows copy command return codes?
I believe Copy
only returns 0 for success or 1 for failure.
XCopy
has documented return codes:
0 = Files were copied without error.
1 = No files were found to copy.
2 = The user pressed CTRL+C to terminate xcopy.
4 = Initialization error occurred. There is not enough memory or disk space, or you entered an invalid drive name or invalid syntax on the command line.
5 = Disk write error occurred.
It might also be worth pointing out that xcopy doesn't always return the error code you expect.
For example when trying to copy multiple files with a wildcard but there are no files to copy you expect a return error code of 1 ("No files were found to copy"), but it actually returns 0 ("Files were copied without error")
C:\Users\wilson>mkdir bla
C:\Users\wilson>mkdir blert
C:\Users\wilson>xcopy bla\* blert\
0 File(s) copied
C:\Users\wilson>echo %ERRORLEVEL%
0
I'd opt for xcopy
in this case since the error levels are documented (see xcopy documentation, paraphrased below):
Exit code Description
========= ===========
0 Files were copied without error.
1 No files were found to copy.
2 The user pressed CTRL+C to terminate xcopy.
4 Initialization error occurred. There is not
enough memory or disk space, or you entered
an invalid drive name or invalid syntax on
the command line.
5 Disk write error occurred.
In any case, xcopy
is a far more powerful solution. The equivalent documentation for copy
does not document the error levels.
As an aside, you may want to rethink your use of the %errorlevel%
variable. It has unexpected results, at least in some versions of Windows, if someone has explicitly done something silly like:
set errorlevel=22
In those cases, the actual variable will be used rather than grabbing the actual error level. The "normal" way of doing this is (in decreasing order since errorlevel
is a "greater than or equal to" check):
if errorlevel 2 (
echo Copy x y failed due to reason 2
exit /B
)
if errorlevel 1 (
echo Copy x y failed due to reason 1
exit /B
)
In addition, if you are running Win7 or Win Server 2008 or later, you should look into Robocopy, which is now the preferred mass-copy solution.