Nowadays people seem to have lost knowledge of what a file system is. A collection of folders (originally called directories) with other files and/or subdirectories (subfolder for you yutes!) contained therein is a concept that the computer users (or shall I say laptop and phone users) seem to have no idea how to work. And if anybody actually looks at the file systems on phones like Android it’s a total mess! And yet file systems is the level that computers work at.
The task at hand is to put the files in /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Application Support from ~/Downloads/FOLDER (substitute the actual folder name that contains all your data). The solution is simply cp -rp ~/Downlaods/FOLDER "/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Application Support. This command should be performed as root so either prepend that command with sudo or first do sudo bash. This is similar to running something as an Administrator in Windows parlance.
Chuck has already laid out all those steps including things like first stopping the Plex Server and the appropriate chmod command and commands to set the proper permissions on the folders and files contained in that folder. You could first zip up the file, move the zip file to the destination directory and then unzip it but that’d be kinda silly to zip it only to unzip it. The above cp command just copies it as is.
One thing I did notice regarding your responses. You seem to not care too much about things like spelling errors. Not trying to be the spelling police but in the world of computers, if you are off by even one letter things won’t work correctly. Computers are very particular, be it Linux or Windows. Attention to detail is critical and getting it right has to be, well, right. It’s just in my 45-odd years of dealing with computers and users I find those users who don’t care if their prose is correct tend to have more problems with computers than others.
Thank you for your detailed explanation. I will try again but im getting frustrated and dont really have time to keep messing with this lol im about to go back to windows. I will admit i go to fast on typing and dont go back and proof read. So lets get a crackin and run some commands lol. Appreciate the help
If you look closely you forgot to close the double quote. Linux is effectively saying “OK, so where’s the rest of the quoted string” and prompts you with “>” for you to finish the quoted string.
At this point type Ctrl-C to abort that command, type Up Arrow to retrieve that previous command, go to the end of the line and type the double quote, and enter.
Oh! And you’ll need to surround the first parameter with quotes too. Any time you are dealing with a file/directory name (file path) that has spaces in it you’ll need to protect it by surrounding it with quotes. Think about it, the command processor is trying to look at this and it breaks the components up based on spaces. If you don’t want it to do that you need to quote file paths that contain spaces.
So the proper command would be:
cp -rp "~/Downloads/Plex Media Server" "/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Application Support"
I’m also assuming you’re running as root (did a sudo bash first). Alternately you could type sudo before the cp part. That’s says “do this command as root” whereas sudo bash says “Run a bash shell as root because I’m probably gonna type in a lot of commands I want you to execute as root”.
If you like to see the file names fly by as they are copied add v to -rp making -vrp but I think you’ll soon get bored of all the filenames flying by (and it slows the cp process somewhat).
BTW this is an excellent example of not paying attention to detail. (Yet we all make these mistakes).
Oh and he missed the quotes on ~/Downloads/Plex Media Server too.
See we all make such mistakes.
Oh, I didn’t know you could just quote the “Plex Media Server” part. Generally I use file name completion (hitting tab while filling out a long filename) which escapes each space or special character with a \ yielding ~/Downloads/Plex\ Media\ Server.
