Copy a file to a chosen destination.

PowerShell: LiteralPath prevents wildcard characters in the source filename from being interpreted.

$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'
Set-StrictMode -Version Latest
Copy-Item -LiteralPath 'source.txt' -Destination 'copy.txt'
[IO.File]::ReadAllText('copy.txt')

Expected output EXAMPLE

copied

Details

Requires PowerShell 7. Save as snippet.ps1 and run pwsh -NoProfile -File snippet.ps1. Tested on Linux; these examples use portable paths and cmdlets. LiteralPath prevents wildcard characters in the source filename from being interpreted.

Keep in mind

Choose an unused destination if existing content must be preserved.

✓ Verified

Tested on Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS · 2026-11-02 18:23:15 UTC · PowerShell 7.6.6 · powershell 7.6.6-1.deb

Test inputs, results and environment

The exact published code ran in a dedicated Linux test container with prepared inputs. Snippet process uid 65534 with a read-only root filesystem and temporary working files. Networking disabled. Fixtures and output records are isolated from the application database. Testing covers this example and its stated checks, not every input, operating system, or runtime version. The Linux container shares its host's kernel; this is not a native Windows test.

Architecture / host kernel: x86_64 / 6.18.54.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2
Snippet identity / locale: uid=65534, gid=65534 (unprivileged process) / C.UTF-8
Interpreter invocation: pwsh -NoLogo -NoProfile -NonInteractive -File snippet.ps1
Container image ID: sha256:ec91410a8f6ec3e985830b5e3a0560306d36f8c1c5ccd91a6699abe707123fa3
Code SHA-256: be8b70a1b9630f052e807362ee37d502e93ee86b3a891fb9b9e8611f6d779d57
Dependencies: powershell 7.6.6-1.deb

Test input setup

These are the prepared inputs used by the test harness. See Details above for the prerequisites and how to run this example.

printf copied > source.txt

Observed standard output

copied

Exit code: 0. Standard error: empty. Validation: Exact stdout comparison. System-dependent values above are one recorded run.

Additional assertions that passed

Checks recorded by the test harness. Where Python assertions are shown, browser cases use Playwright and simulator cases may inspect pin transitions: result.stdout is captured output, work is the temporary directory, and Path is pathlib.Path. The harness also imports json and csv.

assert Path('copy.txt').read_text() == 'copied'