Alias to copy a file to a specific file

A function would be more appropriate.

In Bourne-like shells:

place() { cp -- "$1" /home/matt/thefile; } 

In shells other than bash, yash and posh you can simplify it to:

place() cp -- "$1" /home/matt/thefile 

In fish:

function place cp -- $argv[1] /home/matt/thefile end 

in rc/es:

fn place { cp -- $1 /home/matt/the/file } 

It's in (t)csh that you'd need to use an alias as those shells don't have functions (it's also csh that introduced aliases in the first place). In (t)csh you can use history substitution to allow some kind of argument passing to aliases.

alias place 'cp -- \!:1 /home/matt/the/file' 

When called as place myfile.txt, they would copy myfile.txt to ~/thefile

If you wanted something that works regardless of the shell of the user, rather than having them add a shell-specific function/alias to their shell customization file, you'd create a script which you'd add in a directory that is in their command search path. Something like:

#! /bin/sh - exec cp -- "${1?Please give the file to copy as argument}" /home/matt/thefile