How do I make a copy of something?

There are times you will want to reuse something you have written before or save a separate copy of an image so that you won’t accidentally delete or overwrite the file. What you want to do is make a copy of something and we can use the copy command in Linux to complete this task. I have put a copy of the course syllabus, syllabus.doc, in /archive/valpo_courses/wxtech, copy it to your working directory or some other directory within your file system, the command is cp. If you wish to copy something between two different computers, then the command is scp. An structure of a copy command is:

kgoebber@bergeron:~> cp <filename 1> <filename 2>

Note

The above example is a generic version of copying a file where you would need to input actual filenames and locations for a specific file that you are looking to copy.

A specific example may look something like:

kgoebber@bergeron:~> cp /data/ldmdata/surface/sao/2023080312.wmo .

The “dot” at the end is very important. That is telling the system to copy the file from the location specified and put it in your current working directory and call it the same thing. Of course, you can change the name of the new, copied, file by replacing the “dot” with the new name you want to give the file. (The above example is a case in which we have used a relative path, you could do the same thing using an absolute path, but it would just be more typing.) When copying a file you make a second file that is an exact replica of the original file.

If you complete a copy command in your own directory and list the contents of the directory you are working in you’ll see the file that you copied to your directory.