Linux Server Security, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Secure Shell Background and Basic Use

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single command line in which you must specify the names and paths of both what

you’re copying and where you want it to go.

This noninteractive quality makes scp slightly less user friendly than sftp, at least for

inexperienced users: to use scp, most people need to read its manpage (or books like

this). But like most other command-line utilities, scp is far more useful in scripts than

interactive tools tend to be.

The basic syntax of the scp command is:

scp [options] sourcefilestring destfilestring

where each file string can be either a normal Unix file/path string (e.g., /docs/hello.txt,

/home/me/mydoc.txt, etc.) or a host-specific string in the following format:

[e-mail]:path/filename

For example, suppose I’m logged in to the host crueller and want to transfer the file

recipe to my home directory on the remote host kolach. Suppose further that I’ve got

the same username on both systems. The session would look something like

Example 4-2.

After typing the scp command line, I was prompted for my password (my username,

since I didn’t specify one, was automatically submitted using my crueller username).

scp then copied the file over, showing me a handy progress bar as it went along.

Suppose I’m logged on to crueller as mick but