How does scp command work

Secure Copy needs authentication from involved hosts. Besides, you should set up an SSH connection between the local host and the targeted remote host before performing the transfer via the protocol. For that, you are required to enter the SSH login information or an authorized key for the public key authentication.

After building up the SSH connection between the two hosts, the SCP client will begin a secure copy process with two different available modes source mode and sink mode.

SCP clients often utilize the -f flag from to trigger source mode. If you want to trigger sink mode to transfer data to the targeted remote host, you need to use -t flag to. As mentioned above, SCP is supported by multiple operating systems and offers an excellent safety solution by including SSH.

Hence, if you want to transfer files quickly and safely to a web server or when the sensitive data needs to be distributed in a local network, SCP is a great option. If you want to see what is happening under the hood, use the -v parameter for a verbose output.

This is a question that was asked on server fault , and as it clarifies in that page, the best option is rsync, but if you can't use it here is a way to copy files with scp, and then if the copy was successful, you can delete the files from the origin.

This only works if you have configured your Linux ssh server to work with ssh-key instead of password.

If you want to copy a complete directory recursively and preserving file attibutes use this command:. Once downloaded you can invoque it from the Windows command line, go to the start menu and click on run then write. Once in the command line, be sure to be in the directory where the pscp file was downloaded, or add that folder to your PATH, let's suppose the folder is your Downloads folder, run this command:.

You will have to set that command every time you open a new command shell, or you can add the path permanently, how to do that is out of the scope of this article. Below are the options of the command, you will see that the options available let you do almost everything. This feature will keep only the remote end in sync with the local, so any change made on the local side, will be updated in the remote side. But this will not work in other way. That is any change in remote will not be updated in local.

You can decide to delete remote files or not at the time of starting the syncronization. If you turn it on, any files deleted on local, will be deleted on remote, but if not, only new added files or changes to existing ones will be updated.

As you can see, you can optain the same basic functionality for Windows that Linux users already enjoy, and this is maybe the best and easieste way to transfer files from Windows and Linux and viceversa.

You may also want to check sftp We will learn in this tutorial about the basic use of the command, and some useful examples and scenarios where you can use it. If the user is not specified it will defaults to the current user in the machine where you are typing the command.

If the host is not specified, it will look for the file locally using any given path. Same as above if the user is not specified but a hostname is given it will defaults to the current username and will try to log in the remote server using that user. To copy the entire revenge directory from your deathstar. You'll be prompted for your password on the source system deathstar.

Therefore, to copy all the. For the following example, assume you dvader are logged into another computer that is, some other computer that's not empire. To copy luke. You'll be prompted to enter two passwords: one for the source system empire. The command won't work unless you correctly enter both passwords. This is document agye in the Knowledge Base.

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