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First post, by nwsguy

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Got a new laptop and wanted to move over a game I have heavily edited. Foolishly went into dosbox and into the games directory where I typed copy *.* and poof. All the file names are still there, but they are empty...30 files and 0 bytes. My computer's backup was disabled (classic) and hope you guys and gals have some ideas to save what has been several years of work and research. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

Reply 1 of 3, by Osprey

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I don't think that there's anything that you can do in DOSBox. Operations are pretty final and there are no safety nets. You're probably limited to what you can achieve in your host OS. If it's Windows, the first thing to try is Previous Versions. Right-click on your Games folder, then choose Properties, go to the Previous Versions tab and, if there's a previous version of the games folder listed, select it and choose Restore. As a last resort, there are always disk recovery tools.

BTW, I had to test this because I almost didn't believe that simply doing "copy *.*" would wipe out every file in the directory... and it's true... and it's still unbelievable. Surely this behavior wasn't in MS-DOS. I'm really surprised that this has been overlooked or not addressed in DOSBox after all of this time. Wow, it's even in the latest SVN builds. It seems like Error Handling 101: if the user neglects to include an important parameter, kindly abort and inform him, don't wipe out every file in the directory.

Reply 2 of 3, by sndwv

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Yikes, that was an accident waiting to happen! Any way to notify the DOSBox devs?

Does anyone know what original DOS behaviour would have been for copy *.*? I just tried in W7 and there it fails with 'The file cannot be copied onto itself' (in a folder with several files). I assume the command means copy everything from the current directory to the working directory (which would be the current one)?