Batch Copying – When you Need Lots of One File

Recently I found myself needing 20 of the same blank document to be filled out with unique information.

Think of something like a form to be filled out by different people, but a PDF form, not a form that spits data into a spreadsheet.

The thought of copying and pasting the document 20 times in its folder deepened my frown lines and surfaced my search strategies. I remembered batch processes in photo editing for resizing and thought there has to be something like that for boring files. Right?

Well, thank Reddit, I found instructions for a process that I could do without downloading something. Yay!

In my case, I opened the command prompt in the file’s folder and tinkered with the command below. You’ll note in the link above the code sample has a comma in the copy’s name (the last string of characters) and it took me a bit to realize that was a typo as I progressed through different error messages (Error Bosses?).

for /l %f in (1,1,20) do copy OriginalFile.pdf Copy%f.pdf

Ah, sweet efficiency!

Now, can I explain all the things in that command? Not yet. Maybe one day.