This may be the fail approach but you could always type while ‘cp’ is copying, hit enter, and as long as the program doesn’t require any further input your command will be run once the previous is finished.

You could also use ‘at’ and have your second copy command run around when the first one should be complete. It may not be perfect but its more efficient then copying two files at once and requires no baby sitting.

It uses robocopy (free from Microsoft). On Linux/BSD/unix I have one called copy.sh which uses rsync

I just edit the file, plug in the info and double click. Robocopy is pretty nice.

@echo off

set SRC=”D:\DVD”
set DEST=”\\fire2\public\dvds”

robocopy2k3.exe %SRC% %DEST% /E /R:5 /W:1 /X /V /Z /ETA /XN /XO

But as “modern” has been specified, you’re presumably using a ‘modern’ OS, which means that your OS will have buffers, and much of the writing to the external drive will merely fill the disk buffers in the OS, and the OS will (as pointed out above) automatically figure out the best way to write the data to disk — which doesn’t really matter anyway unless you’ve partitioned your external disk into multiple partitions.

It’s more important to queue network downloads than disk writes.

for i in {file1,file2}; do cp $i /path/to/usb/drive/$i; done

which will do them sequentially be default as the second call to cp won’t be called until the first has complete.

You could argue that you specified you were using a GUI file manager, but I would counter that you should be choosing the right tool for the job.