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Copying files using scp

Copying files between different Linux, macOS and Windows machines can be done with the scp command. Thus, you can use scp to transport data between CSC and your local computer, or between different file systems at CSC.

The basic syntax for copying data from a local machine to a remote server is:

scp /path/to/file username@server:/path/to/remote/destination

And correspondingly the syntax to copy files from a remote server to a local machine is:

scp username@server:/path/to/file /path/to/local/destination

For example, the command to copy a local file data.txt from the current directory to the home directory of user bob on Puhti would be:

scp data.txt bob@puhti.csc.fi:~/

The special symbol ~ points to the user's home directory. You can use the csc-workspaces command on Puhti to show other available disk areas.

To copy complete directories, you should use scp command with option -r. For example:

scp -r /path/to/data_directory bob@puhti.csc.fi:/scratch/project_2001234/data_dir

The above command would copy the directory data_directory and all its contents to Puhti at /scratch/project_2001234/data_dir.

Copying the data from a CSC server to your local machine is done in the same way:

scp bob@puhti.csc.fi:/scratch/project_2001234/data.txt .

The . symbol points to the current working directory on your local machine, i.e. the location where you're running the scp command.

In the commands above, files and directories have been copied one at a time. However, scp can also copy several files at once. For example:

scp data1.txt data2.txt data3.txt bob@puhti.csc.fi:~/

You can also use wildcards when defining the files to be copied. For example, to copy all files with extension .txt from the current directory on your local machine to your home directory on Puhti, you could use the command:

scp *.txt bob@puhti.csc.fi:~/

By default, the copied files are treated as new files, but if you add option -p to the scp command, then the copied file will inherit the timestamp and access mode information from the original file.