terminal "cp" problem

[huNti]

I made a folder named "test" on my desktop. After that I wanted to do txt file in it, so I did

cp test.txt test/test2.txt /home/hunti/Desktop

and I get error

cp: cannot stat `test.txt': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `test/test2.txt': No such file or directory

I also tryd

hunti@hunti-Aspire-M7720:~/Desktop$ cp test test/test2.txt

and get error

cp: omitting directory `test'

And still see no txt file in my test map. I try'd the help of cp manpage and help but nothing helped me with this.

What am I doing wrong??

Thanks

[elija]

Let's start from the beginning with the directory creation.

mkdir test-directory

Now to create some test files. There are many many fine ways to do this and these are just a couple.

touch testfile-1
ls -al > testfile-2

So to copy testfile-1 into our test-directory we simply use

cp testfile-1 test-directory/

and to copy both files we can either use

cp testfile* test-directory/

or

cp testfile-1 testfile-2 test-directory/

[Cabhan]

So, let's start with what "cp" does. "cp" copies files. In the first command you ran, you tried to copy a file called "text.txt" in the current directory into the "test/" directory and call the copy test2.txt. The problem is that you do not have a file called "test.txt" in the current directory.

The second command that you ran, you tried to copy a directory, which "cp" will by default not do. To copy a directory, you must use "cp -R" (the -R stands for "recursive"). However, you also cannot copy a directory into itself, so the command would still have failed.

elija's answer explains how to create files and copy them around. If you would like to create a text file with some content that you write, you should use a text editor: vi and Emacs are the very popular ones, but they are very complicated. For a simpler commandline editor, you can try nano. For graphical text editors, try gedit (Gnome) or Kate or KWrite (KDE).