A quick one today, use scp to copy files to and from a remote machine. scp uses SSH to securely transfer files from one computer to another. As long as you’re able to SSH into a machine, you should be able to use scp.

The general structure of scp is:

scp user@host:file user@host:file

If you’re transferring to or from your local computer, you can just use a path instead.

To copy a remote file to your local machine:

scp [email protected]:backup-2014-05-04.zip ~/backups/

Or, copy a local file to the remote machine:

scp ~/cats.jpg [email protected]:~/

You can specify any source and target directories that you have permissions to write or read from.

scp is a simple and useful tool that should be part of any developers toolkit.

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