SCP (Secure Copy Protocol) is a useful command to copy files between systems, we’ll explore a few example scenarios that you’ll commonly use. I’m not going into great detail about all the various arguments and options you can use, these you can find in other articles elsewhere. Instead this is going to be a very high level and quick “cheat sheet”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In all cases you’ll need to ensure that the user account you are using on the remote host actually has permissions to read\/write\/change files in the location, or the copy may fail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Copy the file myfile.txt<\/strong> from my local host to a remote host 192.168.1.10<\/strong> into the remote directory: \/home\/bobsmith <\/strong>(i.e. Bob Smith’s home directory on the remote host), logging on as the user bob<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or putting that in vanilla terms:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Copy the file myfile.txt<\/strong> from the remote host 192.168.1.10<\/strong> into my current local directory (that’s the dot “.” at the end of the command), from Bob Smith’s home directory \/home\/bobsmith<\/strong> on the remote host, and logging on as the user bob<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or putting that in vanilla terms:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ok, so now for a potentially useful one where you can copy a file between two remote hosts. In this example we are copying the myfile.txt<\/strong> from the remote host 192.168.1.10<\/strong> to the second remote host 192.168.1.11<\/strong> where we are copy from Bob Smith’s home directory on each of the remote hosts. Bear in mind that you must be able to logon to both of the remote hosts in order to copy the file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In vanilla terms, that is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n So bear in mind that since OpenSSH 8.7 that the data is actually routed through your local machine, so you are in effect logging into host1, copying the file via your machine to host2. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You may use a method whereby host1 copies direct to host2, by adding the “-R” argument, for example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, be aware that for this to work, you must be able to logon to the second (destination) host without a password prompt, i.e. using an SSH key authentication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some useful extra options:<\/p>\n\n\n\n -r = Copy a directory and all of its contents (recursive).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Copy a number of files in a single command:<\/p>\n\n\n\n -p = Preserve the file’s metadata (modification time, access time etc.):<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you want to use SSH key for authentication, it’s as simple as specifying the key with “-i”, obviously you need to have already pre-staged the key on the remote host!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s an extra example, if you wanted to only copy specific file types from a remote host, for example just the log files within a directory, something like the following can be used, but you need to remember that without single quoting the path, your local shell tries to pattern match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also escape the slashes in the pathname, that has the same effect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SCP (Secure Copy Protocol) is a useful command to copy files between systems, we’ll explore a few example scenarios that you’ll commonly use. I’m not going into great detail about all the various arguments and options you can use, these you can find in other articles elsewhere. Instead this is going to be a very … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-linux","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5470"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5475,"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470\/revisions\/5475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geekmungus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}$ scp myfile.txt bob@192.168.1.10:\/home\/bobsmith<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n$ scp <localfile> <username>@<hostname>:<remotedirectory><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nCopy File from Remote Host to Local Host (i.e. Download)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
$ scp bob@192.168.1.10:\/home\/bobsmith .<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n$ scp <username>@<hostname>:<remotedirectory> <localdirectory><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nCopy File from Remote Host 1 to Remote Host 2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
scp bob@192.168.1.10:\/home\/bobsmith\/myfile.txt bob@192.168.1.11:\/home\/bobsmith\/myfile.txt<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nscp <username>@<hostname1>:<remotedirectory> <username>@<hostname2>:<remotedirectory><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nscp -R bob@192.168.1.10:\/home\/bobsmith\/myfile.txt bob@192.168.1.11:\/home\/bobsmith\/myfile.txt<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nCommon Extra Options<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
$ scp -r \/local\/directory <username>@192.168.1.10:\/remote\/directory<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n$ scp myfile.txt secondfile.log thirdfile.bin bob@192.168.1.10:\/home\/bobsmith<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n$ scp -r myfile.txt bob@192.168.1.10:\/home\/bobsmith<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n$ scp -i ~\/.ssh\/id_ed25519 myfile.txt bob@192.168.1.10:\/home\/bobsmith<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nExtra Example<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
$ scp bob@192.168.1.0:'\/var\/log\/*.log' .<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n