Copy/pasting files in finder?

After using OS 9 for a while, and growing accustomed to the quirks and how to move around in it, I've found that there is no way to copy and paste files for the purpose of...........well copying them and pasting them somewhere else. I've found that if I want to copy a duplicate of a file somewhere else, I must first duplicate the file in the location that it's at, and then, move the duplicate to the desired location. Then, once the duplicate is where I want it, I must deal with the fact that the file name is appended with "copy" on the end of it, and rename it if it bugs me.
Now, this is all fine and dandy, until last night, when I had a bunch of music files on a USB flash drive that I wanted to import onto iTunes (that's iTunes version 2.0.4
I found that when I plugged the flash drive in, it mounted on my desktop. I opened the flash drive contents, and saw my music in it's own folder. I thought I'd just drag and drop the folder of songs into iTunes. I did, and it seemed to work. But when I ejected my flash drive, iTunes didn't know where my songs were -- go figure they were nowhere to be found on my hard drive, but instead iTunes was just reading them off of the flash drive.
So, I deleted the broken song links from my iTunes library, and reconnected my flash drive. I then dragged-and-dropped the folder of songs onto my desktop, which took about 1 second.......strange I thought. I control-clicked on the folder on my desktop, and it indicated that it was still stored on my flash drive. I even tried moving this folder to my root Macintosh HD level, and it went in instantly, but it seemed as though it was just an alias of the folder. If I ejected the flash drive, the folder would disappear. If I put the flash drive back in, it reappeared.
Finally, I moved the alias-like folder to my desktop, control+clicked on the folder, and chose "duplicate." 10 minutes later the duplicate was on my desktop, and both folders were registering that they were stored on the flash drive. But, I moved the duplicate folder to /documents/itunes/itunes music, and then they seemed to actually go to my hard disk. I ejected the flash drive, and the first folder went away from my desktop, but the duplicate ones were still on my hard disk (whew!) and I was able to add the folder to library successfully.
Now, luckily I had enough extra space on my flash drive to do this operation, but if not, I'm not sure how I could have moved these files onto my hard disk without duplicating them, and moving the duplicates. Did I miss something? Or is this just the nature of the beast?

Hi, sapranojam85 -
That is the nature of it.
The desktop is shared turf. Every mounted volume has a desktop - it's an invisible, transparent, always open folder. Imagine them stacked one on top of the other, like layers - the mouse has the ability to ignore the layers, but the files (the icons) do not.
When you drag an item out of a mounted volume's icon, it is dragged onto its own desktop - and is not actually copied anywhere, nor moved to a different volume. When the volume is dismounted, the files go with it, since the desktop later they are on is still part of that volume.
The solution - drag the files into a folder belonging to your hard drive (such a folder can be on the desktop, because it will be on the desktop layer belonging to your hard drive), or drag the folder of them onto the icon of your hard drive. Doing that will copy them to the hard drive - and they'll stay behind when you dismount the other volume.
Another way which should work better in this case...
When you hold down the Option key and drag an item (file or folder) to a new location, the item is copied to (duplicated at) the new location. If this new location is in a folder or place other than the original folder, the term "copy" will not be appended to the name of the item. And, if the destination is the desktop, the item should be placed on the dekstop layer belonging to the boot volume.
So, if you hold down the Option key and drag a folder from your flash drive to the desktop, the folder should be copied to the desktop layer belonging to your boot volume (your hard drive), and should not have the term "copy" appended to it.
A quick way to verify if such is successful without unmounting a volume to check, is to do a Get Info (Command-I) on the copied folder - the "Where" info line in the Get Info window will tell you which drive the item is on.

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Message was edited by: jdubfromtx

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I Cannot do "Copy-Paste" file?

Dear Friend...
I Cannot Do "Copy-Paste" File. And Error message pop and say: "Error - File Integrity Violated!".
So... What is that meaning?
Please Answer me
Thank You...!!!

hy,
If you have any fast copying software( Teracopy) then uninstall it. After uninstall complete reboot your computer and try copy-paste again
Good luck
feroz syed ;)
thanks a lot

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to leave a space between input and thePath under the mv command?
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Try using:
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "Finder"
set theWindow to window 1
set thePath to quoted form of (POSIX path of (target of theWindow as string))
end tell
do shell script "mv \"" & input & "\" " & thePath
return input
end run
(45977)

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meanwhile got a reply in another forum that works like charm exactly as I want...I post it here below for future newbies...
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Copy/pasting files in finder?

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