Admittedly I haven’t used MS-DOS in quite a while and sadly even after all of the cool advances in Windows I find myself still needing it.  For example I have to batch scripts I started to work on today.  The first one is supposed to copy all of our digital photographs to all of our other computers.  That is so that using the My Pictures screen saver lets us see all of the photographs we’ve taken over the past five plus years.  The second one is simply supposed to copy all of our files from one PC to another PC.  Using the xcopy /?  I thought that

XCOPY C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\*.* \\dell333\Backup\DellP4\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\*.* /D /E /C  

would copy all of our pictures from the shared My Pictures directory to a PC named Dell333’s shared My Pictures directory.  When run it would (OK should) skip all of those files with the same date and time stamp (/D without addt’l parameters), copy the even those directories who were empty (/E), and continue copying even if an error occurs (/C). Instead I get an “Invalid number of parameters” error.

I think I understand why Unix SysAdmins (who are incredibly adept with scripts) don’t like Windows.  Any one have any ideas?