Strange Xcopy Behaviour

  • Thread starter Thread starter Barney
  • Start date Start date
B

Barney

Has anyone else ever observed this? On several occasions
(I believe both interactively and from within a script) I
have seen an Xcopy operation pause by itself
indefinitely. Pressing the Enter key resumes the
operation. There is no STDOUT redirection going on so
there is no prompt actually occurring. I believe on most
occasions the source and destinations are on opposite ends
of a WAN link (a T1). Recently, I actually let the
process sit in its 'idle' state for over an hour to make
sure it was not actually copying but as soon as I pressed
the Enter key, the next file was processed. Weird eh?
 
Only time I've seen XCOPY "pause" indefinitely is when it is asking if the
target is a File or Directory.
i.e.
XCOPY SOURCE TARGET

There are also other XCOPY parameters that may be of interest:
/W Prompts you to press a key before copying.
/C Continues copying even if errors occur.
/Y Suppresses prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an
existing destination file.
/-Y Causes prompting to confirm you want to overwrite an existing
destination file.
/Z Copies networked files in restartable mode.


If you see halts during network xcopy, I think you're just not using the
right switches. What switches are you using, and what's an example
commandline that has issues?

For reference, I can tell you that the IIS team invokes XCOPY several
thousand times a day over the network, frequently on hundreds of machines
concurrently, and I've NEVER seen XCOPY halt in the manner you describe in
years except when the wrong commands or switches were given in automation
(due to our scale, these things are quickly found).

--
//David
IIS
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
//
Has anyone else ever observed this? On several occasions
(I believe both interactively and from within a script) I
have seen an Xcopy operation pause by itself
indefinitely. Pressing the Enter key resumes the
operation. There is no STDOUT redirection going on so
there is no prompt actually occurring. I believe on most
occasions the source and destinations are on opposite ends
of a WAN link (a T1). Recently, I actually let the
process sit in its 'idle' state for over an hour to make
sure it was not actually copying but as soon as I pressed
the Enter key, the next file was processed. Weird eh?
 
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