{"id":12365,"date":"2019-11-23T09:51:12","date_gmt":"2019-11-23T09:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/dazposer\/?p=12365"},"modified":"2019-11-23T09:51:12","modified_gmt":"2019-11-23T09:51:12","slug":"how-to-easily-combine-and-merge-selected-sub-folders-in-windows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/2019\/11\/23\/how-to-easily-combine-and-merge-selected-sub-folders-in-windows\/","title":{"rendered":"How to easily combine and merge selected sub-folders in Windows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Problem:<\/strong> You have a massive .ZIP or .RAR file, perhaps an old archive of Poser content you archived a decade or more ago. It has a structure that looks like this:<\/p>\n

MyAmazingContent1
\n   | Runtime
\n         |Textures
\n         |Libraries
\n         |Geometries
\nMyAmazingContent2
\n  | Runtime
\n         |Textures
\n         |Libraries
\n         |Geometries
\nMyAmazingContent3
\n   | Runtime
\n         |Textures
\n         |Libraries
\n         |Geometries<\/p>\n

What you want to do:<\/strong> You want to extract just<\/em> the sub-folders named “Runtime”, combining them into a single new folder named Runtime, while keeping their lower directory structure intact-but-merged<\/em>. Because that’s what you’re going to need to do, to merge them back into your main Poser Runtime folder and thus make them usable.<\/p>\n

The solution:<\/strong> It can be done quite simply in Windows, and without freeware or command-line code or PowerShells. And without several-hundred tedious manual click-copy-merge operations.<\/p>\n

1.<\/strong> First, simply extract the entire .ZIP file. (Don’t waste time messing around with tricky command-line controls for the like of 7-Zip and WinRAR, trying to extract just the Runtime folders. You may be able to do that, but you won’t also get the merged sub-folder structure you want<\/em>).<\/p>\n

2.<\/strong> Now open the resulting extracted folder with the standard Windows Explorer. Add there a new empty sub-directory called Runtime, as a newly added folder among all the extracted folders. We’ll be using it a few steps later.<\/p>\n

3.<\/strong> Now use Windows Explorer to keyword search inside your huge extracted mega-folder for the word “Runtime”. A huge list of sub-folders will appear as the search results…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

4.<\/strong> Shift-click and scroll on these found Runtime folders to select them all. Then right-click and copy-paste them into the top level of your newly extracted folder. NOT directly into the new Runtime sub-folder we just created. Windows 8’s mighty cyber-brain then spots the empty Runtime folder and thinks… “so that’s<\/em> where all these same-name folders should go, ok let’s merge ’em all in!”<\/p>\n

This method works and takes advantage of an auto-merge feature in Windows, which many Poser folks used to manually dealing with installing to runtimes will be aware of. If you copy-paste a folder with the same name, it merges without any fuss. Thus, in this case, your 250+ Runtime folders become one, while retaining their sub-folder structure…<\/p>\n

   | Runtime
\n         |Textures
\n         |Libraries
\n         |Geometries<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

All our Runtime folders are now nicely amalgamated, and ready for a final check and then to be copy-merged in the same way into the main Runtime used by Poser.<\/p>\n

Just note that those still on Windows 7 may get a prompt about merging. On Windows 8, you won’t, it’ll just go ahead and do it. I’ve no idea about Windows 10, but I assume it behaves much the same as Windows 8.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Problem: You have a massive .ZIP or .RAR file, perhaps an old archive of Poser content you archived a decade or more ago. It has a structure that looks like this: MyAmazingContent1    | Runtime          |Textures          |Libraries          |Geometries MyAmazingContent2   | Runtime          |Textures          |Libraries          |Geometries MyAmazingContent3    | Runtime          |Textures          […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automation","category-poser","category-tutorials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/dazposer\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}