Use scp to transfer a file from local directory X to remote directory Y

If you’re running this scp command on the remote machine, it is looking for file.ext as a “local” file, i.e. on the remote machine.

To copy a file from the remote machine to the local one, use scp -P 2222 username@domain:dir/file.ext localdir (assuming that file.ext is in ~/dir on the remote computer, as in your example). If you run scp on the remote machine, reverse “local” and “remote”.

If you happen to be on OSX…

When I tried running it with username@local:/file_directory…

I got the following error:

ssh: local: node name or service name not known

Solution

On my Mac I had to do the following to setup local ssh:

‘System Preferences’ –> ‘Internet & Networking’ –> ‘Sharing’ –> ENABLE ‘Remote Login’

This then provided the username@ip address.

I provide two methods of up/down load file between remote and local machine(I use Mac air):

In this case, I want to up/down 11.jpeg between local and remote:

1. Copy files on service to local dir: You must be in local bash terminal to conduct this command, not when you are in ssh!

   scp username@domain:/home/xxx/xxx/11.jpeg /Users/username/Desktop/   
   

   copy files in local dir to remote service : also you must be in local bash terminal

   scp /Users/username/Desktop/11.jpeg username@domain:/home/xxx/xxx
   

2. To achieve the same intention when you are logging in the SSH, you must first set “System Preferences>sharing>remote log in>all users(I am not sure if you must set for "all users", but it works in this situation)” the Mac will tell you"To log in to this computer remotely, type:

   ssh username@xxxxxx, then type in the command below:
   scp username@domain:/home/xxx/xxx/11.jpeg username@xxxxxx:/Users/username/Desktop/**
   

This command above is for downloading file from remote to local when you are logging into ssh, Just change the two path when you want to upload file .

Solution to copy files from Linux client to Linux server

1. Check if sshd is running on your server using:
   ps aux | grep sshd

2. If not, install OpenSSH using
   sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client
   https://www.tecmint.com/install-openssh-server-in-linux/

3. Restart your server and verify that sshd is running using
   ps aux | grep sshd

4. If you need you can configure your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file,
   but it’s not
   necessary for simple configurations

5. verify that the ports are open using netcat: 
   nc -v -z 127.0.0.1 22

6. To copy files from a Linux client to a Linux client use scp as follows
   scp ~/filename.md username@10.22.33.45:~/folder/filename.md

7. To verify that file has been copied use
   ssh username@10.22.33.45 and provide your password.

Solution to copy files from Linux client to Windows

1. There are multiple clients for running SSH servers on Windows, such as:

   • OpenSSH from MS
   • MobaSSH
   • Bitvise SSH server

2. Install one of the above servers and make sure that port 22 is open using

   netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="SSH Port 22" dir=in action=allow protocol=UDP localport=22
   netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="SSH Port 22" dir=out action=allow protocol=UDP localport=22 
   

   netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="SSH Port 22" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=22
   netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="SSH Port 22" dir=out action=allow protocol=TCP localport=22
   

   netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off
   

3. Comparisons of these servers:

   Bitvise SSH server

   1. Provides almost close to native cmd prompt, powershell prompt,
      autocompletion

   2. Provides additional capabilities for customization, if you need
      advanced usage

   3. User customization for simple needs is 0. I got started on it within
      2 minsute, after having spent a lot of time trying to get MobaSSH and
      OpenSSH to work.

   4. To copy files using scp use:
      scp ~/filename.md username@10.33.44.45:/C/Users/username/filename.md

   5. Free for personal use, $99 for professional use. Because of so many
      features and great integration, the price is well worth the money.

   MobaSSH:

   1. provides a Linux shell on Windows where simple Linux commands such
      as ls, cp, find, etc., work, similar to MINGW64

   2. you can access cmd and powershell directly by typing cmd or
      powershell

   3. Unicode support is poor. Encoding is not correct. For example if you
      try to start Python interpretor, it will crash. You will need to
      change the encoding manually using
      (https://stackoverflow.com/a/12834315/4752883):
      chcp 65001
set PYTHONIOENCONDING=utf-8
      and then startup Python prompt

   4. The great thing about MobaSSH is that it has a very simple
      user-interface, and scp and ssh and integrated well. So will
      work for simple use cases

   5. To copy files from a Linux client to a Windows server running
      MobaSSH: use
      scp ~/filename.md username@10.33.44.45:/cygdrive/c/Users/username/filename.md
      This is because MobaSSH is based on Cygwin and its drives are
      mapped to the same way cygwin-s drives are mapped.

   Use VMs from Microsoft with OpenSSHv6.7 installed from
   https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/,
   OpenSSHv6.7 is already installed.

   1. It’s very buggy, and you will need to heavily customize it.

   2. Command completion doesn’t work

   3. It will leave blank spaces when you are moving cursor on the terminal

   4. Python doesn’t work

   5. Later versions of OpenSSH, may have improved on it. Further, MS seems to
      make OpenSSH available via "Optional Features"
      https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/

I had this same problem today on MAC.

Type the following command:

scp /local-file-path/ /-remote-location-path/

Update

We can also use scp -r source_folder destination_folder if not too many files in the folder.

Original Answer

Use the scp command

If you want to transfer a folder, just zip it first, we can unzip it later on.

From your computer, run this:

$ scp your_path_to_the_file/the_file root@10.145.198.100:~/

Here, root is your account, and 10.145.198.100 is the remote server’s IP address. We’re going to copy the_file to ~/ folder in the remote.

Unzip file:

$ unzip the_zip_file.zip -d destination_folder

Just a small contribution, maybe it can help beginners like me: the path to the the remote directory should be written like this: username@domain:~/remote_directory

What I want to highlight here is that we should always add that :~/