Can I create a new directory and copy files to it in a single command (not by linking 2 commands with a semi colon)? If so how? The only way I can see to do it is to first create the new directory using mkdir THEN copy files to it using the cp command.

Actually, I would not use a semicolon anyway ...

maybe you could use "mkdir dirname && cp /path/to/file* dirname/" instead

It is still 2 commands, I don't know how to do it with one (I don't think it is possible)

Why can't you use 2 commands ??

hope this can help

when you use cp -r (the recursive option), directories are created and files are copied into them without keying in two separate commands, if that's what you want

Say I had a file called
/home/adirectory/text.txt
and I wanted to copy it to a directory that does not yet exist, say
/home/adirectory/newdirectory

prior to executing the command I am looking for, the directory
/home/adirectory
does exist, but
/home/adirectory/newdirectory
does not exist

In one command I want to create the new directory
/home/adirectory/newdirectory
AND copy the file
/home/adirectory/text.txt
to it

I can do it thus
$ mkdir newdirectory;cp test.txt ./newdirectory
by chaining two commands, but I was wondering if it can be done using a single command.

Try cpio, e.g.... man cpio for details.

Thanks, that will work. I thought that if you specified a destination directory that did not exist when using the cp command, that the cp command would create it. I was wrong.