scp recursive command for local to remote copy
So, I have been doing some scp stuff recently from my local machine to my server, and today, by mistake, I excecuted the following:
scp -r myfolder [email protected]:/home/myhome .
What I meant to do was to copy myfolder from my local machine to my remote, but I had forgot to set the folder and used . at the end by mistake.
Now, the first output I got was:
cp: `myfolder' and `./myfolder' are the same file
and then, it went on to transfer a range a files ( a lot of them).
Now, I am totally clueless what happened - and where the transferred files are.
Not that this is of any concern i.e in terms of security etc, but I am trying to learn here what really happened when I used:
scp -r myfolder [email protected]:/home/myhome .
Answer
. is the current folder. The command above copied the folders myfolder and [email protected]:/home/myhome into the current folder, hence the error message that you tried to copy myfolder to myfolder.
I'm a bit surprised that scp didn't stop after the error. Since it didn't, you'll find a new folder myhome next to myfolder with files from your server.