What is the meaning of object cloning in Java?

 

Object.clone() method is used for creating an exact copy of the
object in Java. It acts like a copy constructor. 

It creates and returns
a copy of the object, with the same class and with all the fields
having same values as of the original object.

One disadvantage of cloning is that the return type is an Object. It
has to be explicitly cast to actual type.