I'm trying the cp commend but i can't make it work right.
i have red hat and i wrote this line:

cp /directury/filename.

and when this didn't work i varied it:

cp /dirsource/filename /dirdest

and so on and so forth, but nothing seems to satisfy him!!

what should i do?

man cp there is everything about this command

What errors did you get?

cp /dirsource/filename /dirdest
should work. Have you read the manual page?

You might need some options: for example:

cp -Rpdf /mnt/WINDOWS/newdocs /home/paul/Desktop

That's exactly what I did ( cp /dirsource/filename /dirdest ), but it doesn't recognize the source name:

cp: cannot stat `/dirsource/filename': No such file or directory

if it is suppose to work... it doesn't... as far as i could understand the manual says to do exactly that.

How ever adding the brackets ([ ]) did change something, but now it doesn't reconize the target:

cp: copying multiple files, but last argument `/dirdest' is not a directory

moreover i understood there was suppose to be a short commend line when you are giving it from the target directory:

cp ~/dirsource/filename.

the dot stating: target present directory.
this idea i took from a unix instructor so i'm not too surprised it didnt work.

any suggestions?

/dirdest is telling linux that dirdest is in your root directory (/). you need to learn about directory structure more, it seems. for now, just use the absolute pathnames, for example, if your home directory is police (/home/police), and the two directories you mention are in police, then you would need something like this:

cp /home/police/dirsource/filename /home/police/dirdest/

you can replace /home/police with ~/ unless you are logged in as root, when you will have to use the complete pathname for user directories.

if you already are in /home/police, you can leave that off, and just use

cp dirsource/filename dirdest

notice no leading slashes, because again, that would say the folders are in the root directory (/).

hth

Wild guess, are you typing the name correctly? Linux is a case sensitve OS, meaning that "Name" is different from "name" which is different from "NAME". make sure you are also including the extensions, as .doc, .zip, .mov etc

synaptical, ty!
it was the unnecessary slash at the begining of the path names!

is there a short line commend for the case that you are giving it from the target directory? (like the thing with the dot)

dont think so, but you can tab it its much more easy e.g. your directory is /home/blubb/muh/ the simply type /h ,press tab,b,press tab,m,press tab

Excellent!!