EViews.com

Posted: **Mon Aug 20, 2018 11:53 am**

Hi

I am struggling with the shell command. When i type

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shell robocopy C:\tvb\ztobedeleted\test1 C:\tvb\ztobedeleted\test2

I get the error message

: robocopy.PNG (6.68 KiB) Viewed 4098 times

However, when i type the command directly in CMD, the folder is copied without a problem, see

: robocopy2.PNG (29.71 KiB) Viewed 4098 times

What am I doing wrong?
Thomas

Posted: **Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:41 pm**

The SHELL command is similar to SPAWN, but it is hard-coded to look for a specific return value of 0 (if you provide arguments after the SHELL command).

It turns out that ROBOCOPY.exe returns 0 only if no files were copied. It returns 1 if at least one file was copied and so EViews assumed this was a problem (the garbage being displayed as the error message was it showing an uninitialized string). So you should use SPAWN instead so that it will ignore any exit codes.

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spawn robocopy C:\tvb\ztobedeleted\test1 C:\tvb\ztobedeleted\test2

If you wanted to make sure that robocopy actually copied at least one file, you could tell SPAWN to look for an exit code value of 1:

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spawn(exit=1) robocopy C:\tvb\ztobedeleted\test1 C:\tvb\ztobedeleted\test2

Steve

Posted: **Mon Aug 20, 2018 9:58 pm**

Perfect Steve, thanks for the quick reply!
Thomas

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shell robocopy

shell robocopy

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