Copying Files with SSH (scp and sshfs)
Files can be copied securely back and forth between computers using the scp command.
scp source ... target
Both the source and the target can be local or remote. It is hence possible to copy files
- from your computer to a remote computer
- from a remote computer to your computer or
- directly between two remote computers.
For remote files, the hostname and location on the filesystem are separated by appending a colon (:) after the hostname. To copy, for example, the file a_file from the current directory to the directory /home/user/location/a_file, one needs to issue
scp a_file user@host.example.com:/home/user/location/a_file
If the path on a remote system is omitted, the file will be copied to the user's home directory. For example, to copy a_file to the user's home directory on the remote host, type
scp a_file user@host.example.com:
To copy an entire directory from the current computer, the -r flag is required. To copy the local folder images/ to the existing folder ~/public_html/ on the remote host, type
scp -r images user@host.example.com:public_html
SSHFS
SSHFS allows to mount a remote filesystem using SSH's SFTP subsystem. This means you can access the files the same way you can access local files.
sshfs [user@]host:[dir] mountpoint [options]
This way, remote files can be edited with any editor or IDE on your local computer. However, compile the files only remotely via SSH to avoid a lot of unnecessary network traffic.
The desired mountpoint must be an existing directory. To mount, for example, your entire home directory from sandbox.bulme.at to the local directory sandbox, type
mkdir sandbox
sshfs user@sandbox.bulme.at: sandbox
After a remote filesystem has been mounted, it can be unmounted using the umount command (note the missing n after the u). To unmount the connection to sandbox created above, type
umount sandbox