Why is this gcloud compute copy-files producing an error message?

Question

When I execute the command

gcloud compute copy-files \"C:\\Users\\fName lName\\Desktop\\testtext.txt\" instancename:test.txt --zone europe-west1-a

Answer 1

Thanks asking this! This appears to be a bug in gcloud that we're now tracking. The issue is that gcloud compute copy-files is interpreting the colon in C:\Users\fNam... as a part of a remote path. As suggested by George's answer, the work around is to avoid local paths containing the colon character.