Clever Geek Handbook

Xcopy with Python

I am trying to get xcopy to work with python to copy files to a remote system. I am using a very simple test case:

import os

src = "C:\<Username>\Desktop\test2.txt"
dst = "C:\Users\<Username>"

print os.system("xcopy %s %s" % (src, dst))

But for some reason, when I run this, I get:

Invalid number of parameters
4

Running xcopy directly from the command line works great. Any ideas?

thank

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3 answers


\t

is a tab character. I would suggest using raw lines for windows:

src = r"C:\<Username>\Desktop\test2.txt"
dst = r"C:\Users\<Username>"


This will stop python from being surprised by interpreting some of your backslashes as escape sequences.

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In addition to using the original string literals, use subprocess

instead os.system

- it will take care of quoting your arguments correctly if they contain spaces. Thus:



import subprocess

src = r'C:\<Username>\Desktop\test2.txt'
dst = r'C:\Users\<Username>'

subprocess.call(['xcopy', src, dst])
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Try to prefix your strings with r

. So r"C:\<Username>\Desktop\test2.txt"

. The problem is that the backslash is treated as a special character in strings.

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