Transferring files with SCP
A useful alternative to rsync
is the Secure Copy (SCP) utility, which comes bundled with OpenSSH. It allows you to quickly copy files from one node to another. While rsync
also allows you to copy files to other network nodes via SSH, SCP is more practical for one-off tasks; rsync
is geared more toward more complex jobs. If your goal is to send a single file or a small number of files to another machine, SCP is a great tool you can use to get the job done. To utilize SCP, we'll use the scp
command. Since you most likely already have OpenSSH installed, you should already have the scp
command available. If you execute which scp
, you should receive the following output:
/usr/bin/scp
If you don't see any output, make sure that the openssh-client
package is installed.
Using SCP is very similar in nature to rsync
. The command requires a source, a target, and a filename. To transfer a single file from your local machine to another, the resulting command would look similar...