Introduction to SCP

SCP stands for secure copy and is the command used to copy files/directories between your personal computer and the research server you are using.

This tutorial also assumes you have some familiarity with Linux directory structure See our tutorial here. Both Mac OS X and Windows employ a tree-like directory structure similar to Linux, so the same basic ideas apply on these operating systems with the caveat that Windows uses a drive letter (usualy C:\) as part of its directory structure convention.

On Mac OS X you will be using terminal to perform SCP using the command scp. On Windows, you must have PuTTY installed and you will be using cmd.exe to do SCP using the command pscp instead of scp.

Copying a file

Below is an example showing the the basic form of the command to copy one (or possibly a few files) from your local computer to a remote server:

scp *.job auser@rcs-scsn.fandm.edu:/home/auser/

• scp (or pscp on Windows) is the command for SCP
• *.job are the file(s) we want to copy to the server. In this example, we are copying all files that end with .job in the current directory we are in on the personal computer
• auser@rcs-scsn.fandm.edu is the research server we want to copy the files to including our username.
• :/home/auser is the directory on the research server we are copying to. In this example, it is the user's home directory.

The command to copy file(s) from the research server to your is very similar:

scp auser@rcs-scsn.fandm.edu:/home/auser/*.job /Users/freddy/Desktop/

• scp (or pscp on Windows) is the command for SCP
• auser@rcs-scsn.fandm.edu is the research server, including our username, we want to copy from
• :/home/auser/*.job are the files we want to copy from the server. In this example, we are copying all files that end with .job in auser's home directory
• /Users/freddy/Desktop/ is the directory on our personal computer where we are copying the files to. In this example, it is the user's Desktop directory.

Copying a directory

The command to copy a directory is almost exactly the same as above except after the scp command we include -r. The examples below demonstrate copying a directory called output to/from a research server similar to the examples above.

scp -r output auser@rcs-scsn.fandm.edu:/home/auser/
scp -r auser@rcs-scsn.fandm.edu:/home/auser/output/ /Users/freddy/Desktop/