On 05/11/2015 12:18 PM, Jamie Bullock wrote: 
> Hi, 
> 
> AFAICT neither [shell] nor [popen] results in portable Pd code, i.e. the specific shell commands are OS-dependent. 
> 
> In any case, I decided to write a new external for the job. In case anyone is interested: [copy] can be used to copy files portably from Pd: http://sourceforge.net/p/pure-data/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/externals/postlude/copy/ 

just wondering whether [copy] is a too generic name. 
probably [filecopy] would be more apt.