Windows system move vs robocopy

Community Support
1

Hello, wondering if anyone has run into this issue before

I am trying to move folders between drives but would like to use ROBOCOPY instead of MOVE

this works

system("move src dest ")

but this does not

system("robocopy src dest /E /IS /MOVE")

nor does

system("robocopy src dest")

although, they do work in cmd

any ideas?

2

We’ve used robocopy in place of move on windows before (windows is pretty painful)

Are you sure it is definitely failing?  If I remember correctly robocopy would return an ‘os error when invoked from kdb+ but would do what we had asked it to do successfully.  I assume it was returning a non 0 exit code which kdb+ is then propagating.  Our solution was… just ignore os errors from robocopy commands!  

3

Thanks Johnny,

Yea I do see `os err but its definitely not moving the requested folders.  It seems the issue is only happening when I try and move folders across different drives.  If I keep drive the same it works fine.  I was trying to edit .os.ren in aquaq but can’t get robocopy to work at all from q.

I think I have a workaround for now to keep drive the same, its not ideal, but works.

Thanks

4

In my testing it seemed to work if I added "%comspec% /c " to the start of the system command e.g.

q)system"%comspec% /c robocopy /move test\ D:\test"

To explain this a little, this is essentially invoking the windows command interpreter with the /c argument to supply a command to be executed immediately. In other words, it’s running robocopy from within a child cmd.exe process, where it appears to work fine

Hope that helps

Jonathon

From: personal-kdbplus@googlegroups.com <personal-kdbplus@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Roni Hoffman <hoffmanroni@gmail.com>
Sent: 17 January 2018 20:50:43
To: Kdb+ Personal Developers
Subject: Re: [personal kdb+] Windows system move vs robocopy
 

Thanks Johnny,

Yea I do see `os err but its definitely not moving the requested folders.  It seems the issue is only happening when I try and move folders across different drives.  If I keep drive the same it works fine.  I was trying to edit .os.ren in aquaq but can’t get robocopy to work at all from q.

I think I have a workaround for now to keep drive the same, its not ideal, but works.

Thanks

5

Hmm this doesnt seem to work for me either, thanks anyway Jonathan, will keep playing with it

6

ROBOCOPY has some `interesting’ error codes when it finds part of the target file already existing, which causes bogus 'os errors even when it completes successfully. Below is a simple wrapper that I frequently use to overcome this issue while logging what actually happened: https://github.com/FlyingOE/q_Wind/blob/master/ROBOCOPY.CMD

7

That’s great!  

That would’ve helped us a while back