How does inventory 'copy' work? How does everything work?

I can't guess what 'copy' does in my inventory. I right click on a folder in the inventory, click on copy, and nothing happens. I look far and wide and find no copy. How does this copy facility work, and what does it do. It doesn't tell me I am not allowed to copy the thing. It just doesn't seem to do anything at all.

I have problems like this in general. I don't know how things work, and although I can sometimes guess, a lot of the time I can't. I have three books on Second Life,and none of them is worth much. (These are: "Second Life for Dummies", "The Official Guide" by Rymaszewski, and "Second Life" by Mansfield.) These books are aimed at the "I don't want to understand it, I just want to know how to use it" people, and I am looking for a lot more. So a deeper question is, where can I look to find a source of information on how things work in general.

I am on a Mac, and I can go as deep into Leopard as I choose, all the way down to programming the Intel chip. And all along the way I can find explanations for each level, and if I want I can consult the source code. It swamps me most of the time but I learn a lot from trying. Is there something like this for Second Life?

Well, you sort of copy it into memory. If you do a "paste" after that in the folder of your choice, it creates the copy you want.

Assuming the item is copyable, go to the place in your inventory you want the new copy, right click, and choose paste.

The wiki and the knowledge base and the jira are all full of information that might be useful.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Main_Page

https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417

https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa

You can read the source code for the viewer if you want. You can find that by searching for "second life source code" in Google. The first link that comes up on my system is http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Get_source_and_compile, which has the links you need to download the source code.

In the windows world, and even before windows, in DOS's file manager, you highlight a file in a file list, and select copy or press Control C, and that copies to memory what the operating system needs to be able to create a copy of the file at another location. Go to the location where you want the copy to be, and select paste, or press Control V, and the copy is created.

In this text box where I'm writing now, I can highlight text, and press Control C, or right click and select Copy, and the information needed to create a copy elsewhere is stored in the Windows copy buffer. No visible copy appears in the text at this time. You move the text cursor to where you want the copy to be, then right click and select paste, or press Control V, and the copy is created at the current cursor location.

This is a common way to do things.

Say you have hair you can copy.
You have to click on the item itself, not the folder it is inside of.
Right click on item > click COPY > right click on item > click on PASTE
You should now see two of the item.

If any item says (No Copy), you can't duplicate it.

I've found some of the best places to learn the basics are the NCI Centers, Dreams classrooms, to name just a couple.

Then, you can move to more advanced subjects.

You can find classes by opening the SEARCH window > Events > category > Education.
Most are free and if there is a fee, the class description will say so.

Suezanne, he's on a Mac.

Though there isn't one in SL per se, think of it as copying to the clipboard.

That doesn't affect the fact that selecting an item for copying, then later selecting where the copy goes to, is a very common way of doing things, which anyone able to "program the intel chip" might be expected to know of, and if they don't know of such a thing, it's time they learned.

In inventory, "Copy" does NOT work at the folder level. You have to create and rename a new destination folder, then open the first folder, select what is in it, copy, click on the destination folder, and then paste.

This will only work if all the selected items are copyable, of course.