Yep, typo with (), there was a proto before and I didn't remove the paren's. The code isn't "strange", looks pretty straight-forward to me.

Now there is a "trick". This code works fastest for a large number of relatively small files. A very simple Perl program binmode or not will also beat Windows XCopy. There is a huge performance hit encountered by writing to the screen. I was stunned when I first saw this. If Xcopy generates a lot of screen output, stdout is what slows this thing down!

Now it could be that WinXP sp3 has improved this...I dunno.