Looks like a misleading error, but at least one problem you’ll have is around the use of doublequotes.
("copy "<pathname>\*.*" "<pathname2>" /Y")
The interpreter would not be able to interpret where the quoted strings are. To embed a literal doublequote as part of your string, you need to percent-encode the ascii value (in this case, %22 for doublequote). Try
("copy %22<pathname>\*.*%22 %22<pathname2>%22 /Y")