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