Newbie question

[thenath24]

Hello all,

Im currently writing a small program that will be invoked has a scheduled task to back up all of the files froma directory on my C drive toa removable disk (F).

I've tried using the following;

system("copy c:\test\*.* f:\");

(which is basically what I did at the command prompt to achieve the same thing)

However when run the program runs it reports that the syntax of the command is incorrect

Any one seen this before or know why?

Nathan

[JosAH]

Hello all,

Im currently writing a small program that will be invoked has a scheduled task to back up all of the files froma directory on my C drive toa removable disk (F).

I've tried using the following;

system("copy c:\test\*.* f:\");

(which is basically what I did at the command prompt to achieve the same thing)

However when run the program runs it reports that the syntax of the command is incorrect

Any one seen this before or know why?

Nathan

A backslash character in a literal string is special to the compiler, e.g. \n
means a new line character and there are more of them. Since the backslash
character is a special character by itself you need *two* of them to have
*one* of them in your literal string, so:

[code=c]
system("copy c:\\test\\*.* f:\\");
[/code]

kind regards,

Jos

[thenath24]

A backslash character in a literal string is special to the compiler, e.g. \n
means a new line character and there are more of them. Since the backslash
character is a special character by itself you need *two* of them to have
*one* of them in your literal string, so:

[code=c]
system("copy c:\\test\\*.* f:\\");
[/code]

kind regards,

Jos

Thanks Jo that worked a treat :-)

Nathan

[Firecore]

so does that mean that we can use system(); to use dos based commands?

[JosAH]

so does that mean that we can use system(); to use dos based commands?

You've got it. Here's a nice reference web page for C/C++:

C/C++ library reference; bookmark the url.

kind regards,

Jos