To make a copy of this file on the diskette in drive A and assign the
name FACTS to the copy, type the following and press
Enter:
COPY A:REPORT A:FACTS
Note that in this case you must assign a new name to the
copy,
since MS-DOS does not allow two files in the same directory to
have the same name.
For any of the previous examples, if you omit the drive identifier
(A: or C:), the COPY command uses the current drive. For
example, if the current drive is C and you want to copy the file
REPORT from drive A to drive C, leaving the name of the file
unchanged, you can enter the command as follows:
COPY A:REPORT
MS-DOS writes the copy to drive C because drive C is the current
drive. You can save a few keystrokes by omitting the drive identifier
of the current drive, but it is equally correct (and safer) to include
all the drive identifiers.
An easy way to copy a group of files at once is by using wildcard
characters in the filenames. A wildcard character is a character
that stands for some other single character or group of characters.
MS-DOS recognizes two wildcard characters: * and ?. The asterisk
represents any group of characters, and the question mark
represents any single character.
For example, to copy all the files on the diskette in drive A to the
current directory on the hard disk, type the following and press
Enter:
COPY A:*.* C:
To copy all files with names that begin with the four letters MEMO
and end with any single character, type the following and press
Enter:
COPY A:MEMO? C:
Using MS-DOS With Your Equity LT-286
5-19
