SCP or Secure Copy is a useful program for sending files between two or more computers over a secure shell (SSH) connection. In this post, I’ll show you how to use SCP to send files from your local computer to a remote, copy files from a remote computer to your local or copy files between two servers.
An SCP command has the following basic structure:
scp [OPTION] [user@src_host:] file1 [user@dest_host"] file2
Where OPTION refers to the optional flags you can pass to scp such as the following:
-
-Premote host SSH port -
-ppreserve file modification and access times -
-qquiet -
-Ccompress -
-rcopy directories recursively
The colon ( : ) that comes after the host IP address or domain name is important.
Sending a file from the local computer to a remote computer
scp file.txt remote_username@host1.com:/path/to/remote/dir
Copy a file from the remote computer to the local computer
scp remote_username@host1.com:/path/to/file.txt /local/directory
Copy files between TWO remote computers
scp user1@host1.com:/path/to/file.txt user2@host2.com:/path/to/file/location
Secure copy to an EC2 instance without password
scp -i mykey.pem somefile.txt root@my.ec2.id.amazonaws.com:/
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