I am attempting to teach myself programming in Linux from a starting point of being an absolute beginner. I chose the project on the BBC’s Click program to make a Raspberry Pi powered VPN thinking it would be a good starting point. However, fairly early on I have become stuck. Everything has worked properly according to the instructions until the section Generating Keys. I am using the Putty program to enter commands and am quite sure that the command line required is entered accurately.
On entering the command line
cp –r /usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0 /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa
I get the response
cp: cannot stat ‘/usr/share/doc/openvpn/examples/easy-rsa/2.0’: No such file or directory
At this point I become stuck and although I have read through all the forum inputs on this subject I cannot find a solution to the problem so would appreciate some help in getting over this hurdle – in simple terms please!

I think the answer lies here:

Are you sure that the directory you're trying to copy exists? Or that the destination exists?

The format for the cp command, which you have followed, is "source" followed by "target", however the system you are on feels that the "source" file or directory is not there.

Firstly, do you understand the -r directive? That means to recurse into a directory, therefore it would expect that "source" you typed to be a directory.

Secondly, do you know how to use the "ls" command? That shows the contents of a directory. Therefore you can do things like:to see what is in the one level higher directory and see if "2.0" is a file, directory, or if it's non-existent.