Hi rstelle and welcome to LQ.
Where exactly does it fail?
Code:
$ cp yearfile yearfile2
That should work fine providing "yearfile" exists and the user you are has read access to that file, and you have a read-write file system so that you can write the resulting file.
Typing the actual string:
Code:
$ yearfile to yearfile3
Is not a command and should be rejected in some form, such as "command not found: yearfile"
Perhaps this will work better if you can post the content of your terminal, showing your command attempts as well as the results, and also some more information, such as a listing of the files and an indicator about the environment where you are working. And do so using [code][/code] tags to enclose it so it will appear in a code window. Here's a possible example:
Code:
$ ls -l
-rwxrwxrwx 1 username groupname 4096 Sep 1 12:24 yearfile
# Lines with # are my comments and not output or commands. The above is a listing of a directory using 'ls -l'
# to see file names and file sizes, as well as the privileges and owner of the file
# rwxrwxrwx - means read/write/execute permissions for owner, group, world (everyone) therefore if you are
# the file owner, the first triplet of information applies to you.
# Note it can be things like r--, rw-, r-x, or even ---; which mean read-only, read-write only, read-execute only,
# or other possibilities including "no permissions"
$ whoami
<username>
# The 'whoami' command tells us what user you are
$ groups
<mygroup> admin other-group-names
# The 'groups' command tells us what groups you are a member of - you don't need to post them all,
# just confirm that you are a member of the group which the file is attached too
$ pwd
/home/<username>/sub-directory(s)
# This outputs the directory where you are located
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 126G 5.1G 114G 5% /
# part of an example showing the diskspace and here /home/<username> is really on the / tree, which is only 5% used.
$ mount
/dev/sda2 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered)
# Will show a lot of other stuff, both before and after the line you really care about
# The mount command shows all mounted drives, here the important part is "rw" to indicate that '/' is mounted as read-write.
# confirming that you can write to that
I know that's a lot and sorry. These commands may not all be necessary. Perhaps you typed a command, which is not a command, which was about the second point I made.
