Linux and UNIX Secure Copy

This article is about the scp command.

The command scp is used to copy files across ssh connection. You can use scp to copy files from or to a remote host. Using ssh for data transfer provides the same authentication and same level of security as ssh.

usage examples

Examples:

Copy the file "foobar.txt" from a remote host to the local host

scp nicolep@remotehost.com:foobar.txt /usr/local/download

Copy the file "foobar.txt" from the local host to a remote host

scp foobar.txt nicolep@remotehost.com:/usr/local/download

More examples:

Recursively copy entire directories. This will get all the web directories and sub-directories and copy to the local machine

scp -r bob@10.0.0.1:/home/httpd/html/*  /home/httpd/html

The -r is the flag for recursive

Now to copy all files in the current working directory to a remote server web directory

scp * nicolep@10.0.0.9:/var/www/html

Copy a file from one remote host to another, neither file residing nor resulting on the current machine.

scp nicolep@serverone.com:/usr/local/download/foobar.txt nicolep@servertwo.com:/home/nicolep

installation

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Trustix

yum install openssh-clients

Debian or Ubuntu

apt-get install openssh-client