scp or sftp copy multiple files with single command

I'd like to copy files from/to remote server in different directories. For example, I want to run these 4 commands at once.

scp remote:A/1.txt local:A/1.txt scp remote:A/2.txt local:A/2.txt scp remote:B/1.txt local:B/1.txt scp remote:C/1.txt local:C/1.txt 

What is the easiest way to do that?

18 Answers

Copy multiple files from remote to local:

$ scp :/some/remote/directory/\{a,b,c\} ./ 

Copy multiple files from local to remote:

$ scp foo.txt bar.txt :~ $ scp {foo,bar}.txt :~ $ scp *.txt :~ 

Copy multiple files from remote to remote:

$ scp :/some/remote/directory/foobar.txt \ :/some/remote/directory/ 

Source:

From local to server:

scp file1.txt file2.sh :~/pathtoupload

From server to local:

scp -T :"file1.txt file2.txt" "~/yourpathtocopy"

You can copy whole directories with using -r switch so if you can isolate your files into own directory, you can copy everything at once.

scp -r ./dir-with-files user@remote-server:upload-path scp -r user@remote-server:path-to-dir-with-files download-path 

so for instance

scp -r root@192.168.1.100:/var/log ~/backup-logs 

Or if there is just few of them, you can use:

scp 1.txt 2.txt 3.log user@remote-server:upload-path 

As Jiri mentioned, you can use scp -r user@host:/some/remote/path /some/local/path to copy files recursively. This assumes that there's a single directory containing all of the files you want to transfer (and nothing else).

However, SFTP provides an alternative if you want to transfer files from multiple different directories, and the destinations are not identical:

sftp user@host << EOF get /some/remote/path1/file1 /some/local/path1/file1 get /some/remote/path2/file2 /some/local/path2/file2 get /some/remote/path3/file3 /some/local/path3/file3 EOF 

This uses the "here doc" syntax to define a sequence of SFTP input commands. As an alternative, you could put the SFTP commands into a text file and execute sftp user@host -b batchFile.txt

The answers with {file1,file2,file3} works only with bash (on remote or locally)

The real way is :

scp user@remote:'/path1/file1 /path2/file2 /path3/file3' /localPath 

After playing with scp for a while I have found the most robust solution:

(Beware of the single and double quotation marks)

Local to remote:

scp -r "FILE1" "FILE2" HOST:'"DIR"' 

Remote to local:

scp -r HOST:'"FILE1" "FILE2"' "DIR" 

Notice that whatever after "HOST:" will be sent to the remote and parsed there. So we must make sure they are not processed by the local shell. That is why single quotation marks come in. The double quotation marks are used to handle spaces in the file names.

If files are all in the same directory, we can use * to match them all, such as

scp -r "DIR_IN"/*.txt HOST:'"DIR"' scp -r HOST:'"DIR_IN"/*.txt' "DIR" 

Compared to using the "{}" syntax which is supported only by some shells, this one is universal

Problem: Copying multiple directories from remote server to local machine using a single SCP command and retaining each directory as it is in the remote server.

Solution: SCP can do this easily. This solves the annoying problem of entering password multiple times when using SCP with multiple folders. Consequently, this also saves a lot of time!

e.g.

# copies folders t1, t2, t3 from `test` to your local working directory # note that there shouldn't be any space in between the folder names; # we also escape the braces. # please note the dot at the end of the SCP command ~$ cd ~/working/directory ~$ scp -r :/work/datasets/images/test/\{t1,t2,t3\} . 

PS: Motivated by this great answer: scp or sftp copy multiple files with single command

Based on the comments, this also works fine in Git Bash on Windows

The simplest way is

local$ scp remote:{A/1,A/2,B/3,C/4}.txt ./ 

So {.. } list can include directories (A,B and C here are directories; "1.txt" and "2.txt" are file names in those directories).

Although it would copy all these four files into one local directory - not sure if that's what you wanted.

In the above case you will end up remote files A/1.txt, A/2.txt, B/3.txt and C/4.txt copied over to a single local directory, with file names ./1.txt, ./2.txt, ./3.txt and ./4.txt

Copy multiple directories:

scp -r dir1 dir2 dir3 admin@127.0.0.1:~/ 

You can do this way:

scp hostname@serverNameOrServerIp:/path/to/files/\\{file1,file2,file3\\}.fileExtension ./ 

This will download all the listed filenames to whatever local directory you're on.

Make sure not to put spaces between each filename only use a comma ,.

scp remote:"[A-C]/[12].txt" local: 

Is more simple without using scp:

tar cf - file1 ... file_n | ssh user@server 'tar xf -' 

This also let you do some things like compress the stream (-C) or (since OpenSSH v7.3) -J to jump any times through one (or more) proxy servers.

Avoid using passwords by coping your public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys (on server) with ssh-copy-id (on client).

Posted also here (with more details) and here.

NOTE: I apologize in advance for answering only a portion of the above question. However, I found these commands to be useful for my current unix needs.

Uploading specific files from a local machine to a remote machine:

~/Desktop/dump_files$ scp file1.txt file2.txt lab1.cpp etc.ext :Folder1/DestinationFolderForFiles/

Uploading an entire directory from a local machine to a remote machine:

~$ scp -r Desktop/dump_files :Folder1/DestinationFolderForFiles/

Downloading an entire directory from a remote machine to a local machine:

~/Desktop$ scp -r :Public/web/ Desktop/

In my case, I am restricted to only using the sftp command.
So, I had to use a batchfile with sftp. I created a script such as the following. This assumes you are working in the /tmp directory, and you want to put the files in the destdir_on_remote_system on the remote system. This also only works with a noninteractive login. You need to set up public/private keys so you can login without entering a password. Change as needed.

#!/bin/bash cd /tmp # start script with list of files to transfer ls -1 fileset1* > batchfile1 ls -1 fileset2* >> batchfile1 sed -i -e 's/^/put /' batchfile1 echo "cd destdir_on_remote_system" > batchfile cat batchfile1 >> batchfile rm batchfile1 sftp -b batchfile user@host 

In the specific case where all the files have the same extension but with different suffix (say number of log file) you use the following:

scp :/some/log/folder/some_log_file.* ./ 

This will copy all files named some_log_file from the given folder within the remote, i.e.- some_log_file.1 , some_log_file.2, some_log_file.3 ....

scp uses ssh for data transfer with the same authentication and provides the same security as ssh.

A best practise here is to implement "SSH KEYS AND PUBLIC KEY AUTHENTICATION". With this, you can write your scripts without worring about authentication. Simple as that.

See WHAT IS SSH-KEYGEN

serverHomeDir='/home/somepath/ftp/' backupDirAbsolutePath=${serverHomeDir}'_sqldump_' backupDbName1='2021-08-27-03-56-somesite-latin2.sql' backupDbName2='2021-08-27-03-56-somesite-latin1.sql' backupDbName3='2021-08-27-03-56-somesite-utf8.sql' backupDbName4='2021-08-27-03-56-somesite-utf8mb4.sql' scp -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub :${backupDirAbsolutePath}/"{$backupDbName1,$backupDbName2,$backupDbName3,$backupDbName4}" . 

. - at the end will download the files to current dir

-i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub - assuming that you established ssh to your server with .pub key

In my case there were too many files with non related names.

I ended up using,

$ for i in $(ssh remote 'ls ~/dir'); do scp remote:~/dir/$i ./$i; done 1.txt 100% 322KB 1.2MB/s 00:00 2.txt 100% 33KB 460.7KB/s 00:00 3.txt 100% 61KB 572.1KB/s 00:00 $