copying the contents of a directory from Downloads to /etc

Question

I want to copy the contents of a folder colors from ~/Downloads/vim-colorschemes-master to /etc/vim/colors. I tried this as instructed:

cp colors/* ~/etc/.vim/colors

But I am getting the error:

cp: target ‘/home/advenio/etc/.vim/colors’ is not a directory

How do I do this correctly?

Solution 1

~ refers to the home directory (in your case /home/advenio/). The place you want to copy it to is /etc/vim/colors

Try the command sudo cp ~/Downloads/path_to_colors/colors/* /etc/vim/colors

Solution 2

Try the following command:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/vim/colors && sudo cp ~/Downloads/vim-colorschemes*/colors/* /etc/vim/colors

Comments

[user68186]

First, are you sure you have an etc folder in your Home (/home/advenio)? Normally there isn't one there. Second, if your destination is /etc, then are you sure the vim folder has a dot in front of it?

[Avinash Raj]

Post the output of [-d /home/advenio/etc/.vim/colors ] && echo "dir" || echo "not dir"

[Avinash Raj]

You said, i want to copy from ~/Downloads/vim-colorschemes-master then why do you try cp colors/* ~/etc/.vim/colors?

[Robin]

@user68186 Ok you were correct abut it.

[Robin]

@AvinashRaj actually I wan to copy the contents of colors in the vim/color dir

[Avinash Raj]

still it was unclear.Post the full path(for both source and destination)

[precise]

Robin just run mkdir -p ~/etc/.vim/colors && cp -rt ~/etc/.vim/colors ~/Downloads/vim-colorschemes-master/colors/* You can check my answer below for more..

[Rinzwind]

he will need sudo for copying into /etc ;)

[Robin]

I tried so, but still getting this error: cp: target ‘/etc/.vim/colors’ is not a directory .

[Robin]

Ok I had to remove . from .vim but now getting this error: cp: cannot stat ‘colors/*’: No such file or directory .

[Robin]

I am getting an error: cp: cannot stat ‘colors/*’: No such file or directory

[Hugo Buff]

colors needs to be in your working directory. I don't know the full path, but if you do something along the lines of cp ~/Downloads/vim-colorschemes-master/colors/* /etc/vim/colors it should work fine. Bear in mind that that's a guess since I don't know your file structure.

[Sylvain Pineau]

I fixed the command but make sure that you downloaded/cloned vim-colorschemes in ~/Download

[Zanna]

this isn't really what OP wanted, they actually wanted to copy the contents, not the directory, although it wasn't clear from the question

[Zanna]

it seems the correct location was /etc/vim/colors (the . was the whole problem I think)