How to say no to all "do you want to overwrite" prompts in a batch file copy?

Question

By default, copying from the command prompt will prompt you to overwrite files that already exist in the target location.

You can add "/Y" to say "Yes to all" replacements.

But how can you say "No to all" ?

In other words, I want to copy everything from one directory that does not already exist in the target.

The closest thing I see is the XCOPY argument to only copy things after a specific mod-datetime.

Answer 1

Unless there's a scenario where you'd not want to copy existing files in the source that have changed since the last copy, why not use XCOPY with /D without specifying a date?

Answer 2

echo "No" | copy/-Y c:\source c:\Dest\ 

Answer 3

You can make a text file with a single long line of "n" then run your command and put < nc.txt after it. I did this to copy over 145,000 instances where "No overwrite" was what I wanted and it worked fine this way.

Or you can just hold the n key down with something, but that takes longer than using the < to pipe it in.