I think that what you need is a file manager, like midnight commander. In mc you can select several files with insert or + and realize operations on them, like deleting, moving or copying. A full set of instructions and tips can be found in the Tutorial.
If you give it a try to pure shell commands (no gui), suppose you have file0 to file10 but wants to copy only file1 and file3:
cp file1 file3 directory/
Of course, you can use the shell to help yourself:
cp file{1,3} directory/
but what about consecutive ones? file5 through file10?
cp file{5..10} directory/
You can also use find
to help, if you want something more advanced, for example:
find Downloads -name "*.cfg" -exec cp {} directory \;
will do this:
copy Downloads/file(6).cfg to directory
copy Downloads/file(7).cfg to directory
copy Downloads/file(1).cfg to directory
copy Downloads/file.cfg to directory
copy Downloads/file(2).cfg to directory
copy Downloads/file(4).cfg to directory
copy Downloads/file(3).cfg to directory
copy Downloads/file(5).cfg to directory
you can verify the files to be copied removing the -exec ...
part. You can also use -exec echo cp ...
in case you want to know what find will do.
-i
, need to RTFM more carefully and come back. I still want to avoid two key presses, though