grunt-contrib-copy dies with EPERM operation not permitted "C:\Documents and Settings"

Question

I am trying to run a simple grunt task using grunt-contrib-copy, but it dies immediately on reaching the copy task, with this message:

Running "copy:main" (copy) task

Warning: EPERM, operation not permitted 'C:\Documents and Settings' Use --force to continue

Aborted due to warnings

I am running:

• Windows 7 64-bit (so C:\Documents and Settings doesn't exist)
• node 0.10.28 (installed at C:\nodejs)
• npm 1.4.9
• grunt-cli 0.1.13
• grunt 0.4.5
• grunt-contrib-copy 0.5.0

I have done a full-text search for "Documents and Settings" on both C:\nodejs and my project folder (C:\Users\myusername\Documents\Programming\myprojectname, with no spaces or parentheses in there), but nothing matches.

My copy task definition is:

copy: {
    main: {
        files: [
            {expand: true, cwd: 'src/core', src: '/**', dest: 'src/chrome/'},
            {expand: true, cwd: 'src/core', src: '/**', dest: 'src/firefox/'}
        ]
    }
},

What could be causing this error?

Answer 1

I fixed it. The problem was the src: '/**' properties in the original code.

I changed it to this, and now it works perfectly:

copy: {
    main: {
        files: [
            {expand: true, cwd: 'src/core', src: '**/*', dest: 'src/chrome/'},
            {expand: true, cwd: 'src/core', src: '**/*', dest: 'src/firefox/'}
        ]
    }
},

The /** src property was breaking it, and **/* works correctly. I'm pretty new to Grunt, so I didn't realize the former syntax was a problem; I somehow got the impression it would be treated as a relative path.

I searched high and low for an answer to this before posting my question. The Grunt docs have a good explanation of Grunt's globbing patterns (*, **, etc.), but it doesn't mention leading slashes being a problem. So, I figured I would leave this up for anyone else who runs into this kind of problem. I hope it helps someone else.