scp and Transferring Files

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scp and Transferring Files#

When working on a remote machine, we often want to transfer files from the remote machine to our local computer. The tool for this is scp, the secure copy protocol.

Tip

If you are using Windows and using PuTTY, then the pscp command can be used. See this pscp tutorial for an example.

scp example#

Let’s recreate our hello.cpp on our local machine (the computer you are sitting in front of).

Listing 1 hello.cpp#
#include <iostream>

// our Hello, World program

int main()
{
   std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl;
}

Now, we want to transfer this to portal.mathlab.stonybrook.edu. We can do this as:

scp hello.cpp username@portal.mathlab.sunysb.edu:~/

Just like with cp, this takes the form of scp source destination

Here, for destination, we have 3 parts plus some separators:

  • your username on the remote machine (written as username here)

  • the machine name (portal.mathlab.sunysb.edu here)

  • the path on the destination machine (~/ here)

These are separated with a @ and a :, in the form: username@machine:path.

In this example, we are pushing the file from our local machine to portal. We could also pull a file from portal to our local machine.

try it…

Create a file test.txt on portal with some simple text and transfer it to your local machine using scp.

Important

In order to be able to ssh into a machine or scp a file to a remote machine, that remote machine needs to be setup to run an SSH server. This is often not the case by default.

This means that for this class, you should push to portal / portal2 and pull from there, instead of initiating the scp on portal / portal2 and trying to push to your laptop.

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