{"id":73,"date":"2009-02-07T05:52:58","date_gmt":"2009-02-07T12:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/?p=73"},"modified":"2009-02-07T05:52:58","modified_gmt":"2009-02-07T12:52:58","slug":"copying-files-between-clients-and-servers-over-ssh-using-scp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/07\/copying-files-between-clients-and-servers-over-ssh-using-scp\/","title":{"rendered":"Copying Files between Clients and Servers over ssh using scp"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s quite common to need to upload or download file between one or more servers and the local computer.<\/p>\n

If it’s available a ssh access<\/em> on the servers, using scp<\/code> to transfer file from and to the server could be a very good option.<\/p>\n

Here’s its syntax:<\/p>\n

usage: scp [-1246BCpqrv] [-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file]\r\n           [-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program]\r\n           [[user@]host1:]file1 ... [[user@]host2:]file2<\/pre>\n
A very simple example:<\/p>\n
scp localfilename.txt remoteuser@www.remotehost.com:remotefilename.txt<\/pre>\n
The previous example copies localfilename.txt<\/code> from the local directory to the server www.remotehost.com<\/code> using remoteuser<\/code> as the ssh account to authenticate on the remote server. On the remote server the transferred file will be stored as remotefilename.txt<\/code> in the default login directory of remoteuser<\/code>.<\/p>\n
Copying file from and to specific directories:<\/p>\n
scp \/localdir\/localfilename.txt remoteuser@www.remotehost.com:\/remotedir\/remotefilename.txt<\/pre>\n
Compared to the previous example, in this case, the file is taken from \/localdir\/localfilename.txt<\/code> and stored remotely on \/remotedir\/remotefilename.txt<\/code>.
\nObviously remoteuser<\/code> should have write permission on the remote directory where the file is going to be written.<\/p>\n
In the next case, the authentication is made through a keyfile, this is the syntax:<\/p>\n
scp -i keyfile \/localdir\/localfilename.txt remoteuser@www.remotehost.com:\/remotedir\/remotefilename.txt<\/pre>\n
In this case to login as remoteuser<\/code> there will not be a prompt for password, but keyfile<\/code> is used as identity file.<\/p>\n
It’s even possible to copy directly files from one server to another<\/p>\n
scp firstremoteuser@www.firstserver.com:\/filename.txt anotherremoteuser@www.anotherserver.com:\/remotedir\/remotefilename.txt<\/pre>\n
Finally one of the best features is to copy recursively directory trees to the remote server:<\/p>\n
scp -r \/localdirectory remoteuser@www.remoteserver.com:\/remotedirectory<\/pre>\n
In this case, the whole content of localdirectory is recursively copied into remotedirectory. This can be very useful for moving quickly website structures.
\nI hope you’ve found some useful information in this tutorial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s quite common to need to upload or download file between one or more servers and the local computer. If it’s available a ssh access on the servers, using scp to transfer file from and to the server could be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,27],"tags":[31,36,33,32,29,35,30,34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zulutown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}