I have an elderly guy next door taking up computing to do his life story. He wants to click on an icon and automatically copy a file from his A drive to a file document on his HD and then vice verca. Any help would be great.

Can't he just use Explorer? Seriously - the graphical interface is supposed to make life simpler for folks by getting rid of that pesky ol' command line ; )

You could create a DOS batch file and keep it (or a link to it) on the desktop, but:

in it's simplest form, the batch would copy a specific file from a: to a specific directory on C: - if anything's not as expected, the process halts with an error message.

You could write a batch that would prompt for user input, but other than an exercise - what's the point? Easier to drag'n'Drop

Simplest would be right-click on the file, then 'send to a:' - he could even add a 'send to c:\whatever' by adding a link to the folder in c:\windows\sendTo

... or am I misunderstanding the whole question here? (there are no icons in DOS)

Press Win key(next to the Ctrl key) and the E key at the same time.The Computer tree is all there. In the LEFT hand panel click on the drive to copy from. Click on the folder you want to copy from and drag it to the drive /folder you want to copy to.

Command lines still beats ANY GUI. Once the script is written and bugfree, it is faster than any manual action.

copies A: to C:

call the script a_to_c.bat
============================================
@echo off
if not exist C:\from_disk_a\nul mkdir C:\from_disk_a
copy a:\*.* C:\from_disk_a
============================================

copies C: to A:

call this c_to_a
============================================
@echo off
copy C:\from_disk_a\*.* a:\
============================================

You can add some extra's like deleting files before copying, only copying newer files .. etc

Make the two BAT-files, as seen above, then create two shortcuts referring to the batfiles, and place the icons wherever you want .. voila !

I dunno why he would be in DOS from win98 to copy files he wrote, but the EDIT program in dos 6.22 has a SAVE AS option when you goto save the file. Tell him to merely type in C:\directory_name\filename and it'll get saved there.