Copying Files Over SSH

Secure copy is a really useful command, and it’s really easy to use. The basic format of the command is as follows:

scp [options] original_file destination_file

The biggest kicker is how to format the remote part. When you address a remote file, you need to do it in the following manner:

user@server:path/to/file

The server can be a URL or an IP address. This is followed by a colon, then the path to the file or folder in question. Let’s look at an example.

scp –P 40050 Desktop/url.txt yatri@192.168.1.50:~/Desktop/url.txt

This command features the [-P] flag (note that it’s a capital P). This allows me to specify a port number instead of the default 22. This is necessary for me because of the way I’ve configured my system.