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