SCP between two hosts with non-standard ports

Originally posted on January 10th, 2020 (more info)

This applies to the BSD version of SCP, so that means MacOS.

When using SCP to transfer files between two remote hosts which both have non-standard ports, the -p and -P flags will not help you. For this, you need to use the scp protocol format. In addition, you have to pass the -3 arg, which transfers the files indirectly through your local machine, rather than directly between the source and destination machines.

scp -3 \
  scp://<user>@<source_hostname>:<port>/<path> \
  scp://<user>@<dest_hostname>:<port>/<path>