Monday, August 06, 2007

Copying multiple files with SCP

I needed to copy several files from one remote host to another. To that end I decided to use scp, but if I simply write one "scp" command for each file I must provide the password each time I enter a command, besides having to repeat the command several times. Fortunately this can be done in a more efficient way. Indeed it is possible to use normal shell expansion, just make sure you use quotes to ensure that it isn’t parsed and expanded by the local shell instead of the remote one. Thus, the command should look like:

% scp me@host:"teste1.zip,teste2.zip,teste" .
at

10 comments:

  1. Thangasivam12/04/2007 5:49 PM

    Dear Alfredo Ferreira,
    I have tried this following command and it doesn't work for me
    scp me@host:"teste1.zip,teste2.zip,teste" .
    but this works
    scp me@host:"teste1.zip teste2.zip teste" .

    And If I want to copy files from directory other than home folder, please help me. above commands are not helping me for this case.
    Sivam

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wireball8/18/2008 7:10 AM

    I was successful with:

    scp me@host:/remote/directory/\{file1,file2,file3\} .

    (note the backslash escapes before the curly braces)

    This worked on FreeBSD, CentOS, and Ubuntu.

    ReplyDelete
  3. mercury2/20/2009 3:06 PM

    Following works perfectly while connecting from "HP-UX B.11.11" to "SunOS 5.10"

    LIBP=/path/on/remote/machine
    scp USER@REMOTE:"$LIBP/file1.jar $LIBP/file2.jar $LIBP/../file3.jar" /path/on/local/machine

    ReplyDelete
  4. ICTgeek4/29/2009 3:10 PM

    Using the following to connect from Mac OS X to Linux works fine:

    scp user@RemoteHost:path/\{file1.txt,file2.txt\} ~/local/path

    ReplyDelete
  5. Nandy7/31/2009 7:49 AM

    scp user@RemoteHost:path/\{file1.txt,file2.txt\} ~/local/path

    is working fine on my machine..RHEL 4

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ravi Mishra10/26/2009 8:09 PM

    Thank you very much Wireball for providing this scp command, i was looking for this command from many days. -- Ravi Mishra

    ReplyDelete
  7. Veda12/07/2009 9:51 AM

    Wireball's command is working between cygwin (windows) to Linux.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Devika Singh9/27/2010 10:28 AM

    Good one !.. Like the description and the link

    ReplyDelete
  9. Unknown4/04/2011 3:05 PM

    I have tried this with a list of files. It works fine unless 1 is missing, then it stops completely and won't copy any more files.

    Is there a way to override this behavior so it just skips missing files and carries on with the copy?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Craig6/01/2011 5:51 PM

    I have written two scripts and this blog helped me.

    I had a script for Linux in which this worked perfectly:

    scp user@remote:path/\{file1.txt,file2.txt\} ~/local/path

    however this did not work when the remote host was UNIX, specifically AIX.

    thanks to mercury I was able to modify my script to work with AIX via:

    LIBP=/path/on/remote/machine
    scp USER@REMOTE:"$LIBP/file1.jar $LIBP/file2.jar $LIBP/../file3.jar" /path/on/local/machine

    thanks mercury

    ReplyDelete