Missing destination file operand

Question

I am beginner as far as Linux is concerned and therfore ran into trouble with the following command.

$ cp VRP/share/ViennaRNA/bin/*.

The error I got is as follows:

cp: missing destination file operand after 'VRP/share/ViennaRNA/bin/*.'
Try 'cp --help' for more information.

Solution

You are getting the error because cp is expecting two operands and you are only supplying one.

If you are trying to copy everything from VRP/share/ViennaRNA/bin/* to your current location (as indicated by .) then you're simply missing a space between your * and ..

Try this:

$ cp VRP/share/ViennaRNA/bin/* .

Note that this will skip directories. If you want that, use the -r flag.

Comments

[Jeff Schaller]

Could you describe your intention with the copy command? What files do you want to copy where?

[NickD]

It will also skip dotfiles (aka "hidden" files: files whose name starts with a period) unless you tell your shell otherwise. In bash, you can set dotglob to include dotfiles in the match: shopt -s dotglob.