After a quick look this does look like a bug. Rclone is treating "remote:Windows Fat" as a local directory rather than a remote. Will investigate further!

is it because I started with a root drive? or because of fat32? or windows keyword? either way it's baffling how simple the workaround is...

I'm away from my computer at the moment - I'll check the source when I get back and all will become clear!

Use F:\ (no quotes).

However, there is something weird in the args parsing. "f:\" is not the same as f:\. Something is doing some escape-stuff. Windows explicitly claims not to do escape processing on \, so it may be some quirk with the flag parser.

I think you must have written this originally

rclone copy -v --log-file=logfile.txt "F:\" "remote:Windows Fat"

In the pastebin the first line is

2016/04/29 20:35:26 Local file system at : Replacing invalid characters in "\" remote:Windows" to "F:_ remote_Windows"

indicating that Windows thought rclone was being run with two arguments

• F:\" remote:Windows
• Fat

So I think this is caused by oddities in the windows command line parser as Klaus suggested, so

rclone copy -v --log-file=logfile.txt F:\ "remote:Windows Fat"

Should fix it

This is caused ultimately by CommandLineToArgvW which states:

CommandLineToArgvW has a special interpretation of backslash characters when they are followed by a quotation mark character ("), as follows:

• 2n backslashes followed by a quotation mark produce n backslashes followed by a quotation mark.
• (2n) + 1 backslashes followed by a quotation mark again produce n backslashes followed by a quotation mark.
• n backslashes not followed by a quotation mark simply produce n backslashes.

The original command line had a mis-matched quote " so it would have been nice if it had given an error.

thanks guys, that answers that, sorry for such a silly question! I'll remember this for the future.

@left1000 I don't think this is a silly question at all - it exposes a bit of windows oddness. I should probably put this either in the docs somewhere!

I've made another issue to write some more docs on the windows shell here #473

I'll close this ticket now as I think we've got to the bottom of it.