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Why is xcopy returning "invalid number of parameters"?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 202642584 views
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Problem

Under some circumstances, xcopy will return the error without giving you a clue as to what’s going on. The usual solution for this is to be sure that your filenames are enclosed in quotes, as this can be an issue with batch files where you have something like and you really need . I recently ran in…

Error Output

C:\Temp\foo>c:/windows/system32/xcopy.exe /f /r /i /d /y * ..\bar\
Invalid number of parameters

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
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Fix for: Why is xcopy returning "invalid number of parameters"?

Low Risk

The solution to this one was tricky: it turns out that xcopy is parsing the forward slashes in the path to its own binary. This works fine: You can also run into this if you have your defined using forward slashes instead of backslashes.

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