Copying files with SCP

While SSH allows us to send commands to a remote computer, SCP allows us to send files. This can be useful if we want to upload a file to a server as part of an application deploy, or even just to share that file with other people.

The command structure is scp source destination, where source and destination represent either local or remote files. A local file is represented by its file path, and a remote file is represented by username@server:/path/to/file.

For example, if we wanted to copy a file from our client computer to a server, we can run the following command:

scp my-file.txt william@my-server:/Users/william/Desktop/

The preceding command will send our file named my-file.txt to the server named my-server, after logging in with the username william. The destination path will be /Users/William/Desktop/my-file.txt.

If we wanted to copy a directory of files instead of a single file, we could use the -r command flag to recursively copy an...