I'm trying to develop a script using PowerShell commands but I am having difficulity with COPY-ITEM.

I want to copy a folder and all of its substructures to another destination folder name.  I wish to overwrite the destination folder name every time.

Copy-Item ./Foldername ./Othername

Does not seem to work for me.  Is there a trick that I am missing?  I tried the get-help copy-item and used the example.

Would XCOPY be better?

copy ./SolarWinds ./SolarStorms -recurse -force

I try this command above.  The first time it works and makes a copy of the Solarwinds directory.  The next time I run it it moves the SolarWinds directory into the SolarStorms directory.  That's not right is it?

Anyway I need a way to do remote copies of folders on remote servers.  I'll probably use PSEXEC and XCOPY unless there is a better suggestion.

I didn't mean move in the move sense of the word.  I ment it copies the Solarwinds dirctory one level down into the solarstorm directory.

I suspect that your issue is that you do not want to copy ./SolarWinds (which is a directory) but rather wish to copy the contents of the directory which is ./SolarWinds/*.* . I think that this is one of the problems with letting the computer try to "guess" your intent.  Sometimes it guesses correctly, and sometimes it does not.

If you do ultimately decide to go the xcopy route, then you should probably use RoboCopy instead.  It is a much more robust and modern version of the XCopy command which has been deprecated in the latest Microsoft OS's

I've run into the same problem.  Copy-Item seems to be a bit buggy.  It behaves very differently depending on whether the destination exists or not.  So, for instance if I have a folder c:\test\a that contains a text file:

Copy-Item c:\test\a c:\test\b -recurse

if c:\test\b does not exist, it will be created, and its contents will be identical to c:\test\a.

if c:\test\b does exist, a copy of c:\test\a will be created inside c:\test\b.

On the other hand:

Copy-Item c:\test\a\* c:\test\b -force

works fine for either case.  But, now suppose that c:\test\a has a sub-directory called aa.  If you run the same command, and b does not exist, it will create b and just copy over the file contents of a.  But if b does exist, it will copy over the file contents, and create any top-level sub-directories.  And it gets even weirder if you use -recurse.  In that case, If b does not exist, instead of copying the directory structure, it will copy all the files in the tree to the root level of b.

Weirdness.  I think the only solution is to check beforehand whether the target location exists using test-path, then adjust your copy call accordingly.