separate cp command from error output

[mwolabs]

Hi, I'm Mwonji. Forgive me if I'm not following the guidelines. I'm just learning, came here through The Odin Project. Total noob. Don't even know the markup language of the document I've just edited. Don't yet know how to use Git or GitHub. First commit or pull request ever.
I noticed that the bash input and output instructions on lines 499 to 503 were in the same box, labeled "bash". It got me confused, thinking I was to enter the expected output as the second line of the bash command. Tried to edit the issue. Hope it works.

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[github-actions]

Thank you!

Thank you for your pull request 😃

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⏱️ Updated at 2025-08-18 11:32:54 +0000

[omsai]

@mwolabs Thank you for the pull request!

@bkmgit White the commit looks good to me I wanted to run this by you before merging because I think we at least should have a more informative commit message; ordinarily I would suggest that @mwolabs should amend the commit message and then do a force push, but default the commit message and branch name suggests it was created using GitHub's graphical editor. Also note that I get a slight different error on macOS 15.5 bash 3.2.57 but the error is similar enough:

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ unzip ~/Downloads/shell-lesson-data.zip
[...]
$ mkdir thesis
$ mkdir -p ../project/data ../project/results
$ cd ~/Desktop/shell-lesson-data/exercise-data/writing
$ cd thesis/
$ nano draft.txt
$ cat draft.txt
It's not "publish or perish" anymore.
It's "share and thrive".
$ cd ..
$ mv thesis/draft.txt thesis/quotes.txt
$ mv thesis/quotes.txt .
$ cp quotes.txt thesis/quotations.txt
$ cp -r thesis/ thesis_backup
$ cp thesis thesis_backup
cp: thesis is a directory (not copied).

[bkmgit]

@omsai On Fedora with Bash 5.2.37 get cp: -r not specified; omitting directory 'thesis'

Maybe it is helpful to have some warnings in the instructor notes that some of the messages may vary.

Feel free to amend the commit message.