Copyfile/ movefile when filenames are not directly available
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Afzal Mohammed
on 28 Mar 2020
Commented: Afzal Mohammed
on 29 Mar 2020
Hello Everyone,
I have two .xlsx files in a folder, I want to copy/ move those .xlsx files to a different folder but the user is not aware of file names which are stored in a workspace variable of the same Matlab program.
As shown below: 'flagged' is a workspace variable of my program which has file names. I want to copy/ move those specific files to a separate folder.
![](https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/uploaded_files/280320/image.jpeg)
I tried following but it's not working
copyfile flagged(i).name newFolder
Please advise.
Thanks!
Accepted Answer
Peng Li
on 28 Mar 2020
flagged is a cell so you couldn’t access it using parentheses and dot motion.
flagged{i} is your ith element in flagged. For example flagged{1} will be myFile.xlsx. If you want to move it somewhere you may also need the full directory as well unless it’s in the current directory.
3 Comments
Peng Li
on 29 Mar 2020
If you need to create a folder called newFolder, use mkdir('newFolder'); first to create a folder named newFolder at the current directory.
More Answers (1)
Walter Roberson
on 28 Mar 2020
Assuming that newFolder is the name of a variable that stores the destination folder name:
copyfile(flagged(i).name, newFolder)
However I would recommend that you should be using fullfile() and should be using exist() to test to be sure that the file exists before you attempt to copy it.
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