>sorry i mistyped. the thing is the command has worked up until just recently then it quit working so it leads me to believe that in some way windows is now blocking the copy.
>the first one that used to work the variable did have to have the .df after it and like i said worked fine the second way that works now with the cop file i changed the variable because i needed to use same variable and copy both the .dbf and .cdx files.

I don't know of anything that has been added or changed with any of the OSs that would affect COPY FILE command. I use it a lot across many versions of Windows (98, NT4, W2K, XP, W2K3) without any issues.