It's a simple question that I can't seem to figure out. I'm on a Mac with Big Sur with all the latest updates, and I'm going through Terminal to get these commands to run. If there's a better way please let me know.
This is, in basic terms, what I'm trying to do--I want RSYNC to recursively go through a source directory (which in this case would ideally be an entire drive), find any files modified within the last 24 hours, and copy those to another drive, while preserving the folder structure. So if I have:
/Volumes/Drive1/Folder1/File1.file
/Volumes/Drive1/Folder1/File2.file
/Volumes/Drive1/Folder1/File3.file
And File1 has been modified in the last 24 hours, but the other two haven't, I want it to copy that file, so that on the second drive I wind up with:
/Volumes/Drive2/Folder1/File1.file
But without copying File2 and File3.
I've tried a lot of different solutions and strings, but I'm running into problems. The closest I've been able to get is this:
find /Volumes/Drive1/ -type f -mtime -1 -exec cp -a "{}" /Volumes/Drive2/ \;
The problem is that while this one does go through Drive1 and find all the files newer than a day like I want, when it copies them it just dumps them all into the root of Drive2.
This one also seems to come close:
rsync --progress --files-from=<(find /Volumes/Drive1/ -mtime -1 -type f -exec basename {} \;) /Volumes/Drive1/ /Volumes/Drive2/
This one also identifies all the files modified in the last 24 hours, but instead of copying them it gives an error, "link_stat (filename and path) failed: no such file or directory (2)."
I've spent several days trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong but I can't figure it out. Help please!
I think this'll work:
srcDir=/Volumes/Drive1
destDir=/Volumes/Drive2
(cd "$srcDir" && find . -type f -mtime -1 -print0) |
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' filepath; do
mkdir -p "$(dirname "$destDir/$filepath")"
cp -a "$srcDir/$filepath" "$destDir/$filepath"
done
Explanation:
Using cd "$srcDir"; find . -whatever will generate relative paths (starting with "./") from the source directory to the found files; that means appending the results to $srcDir and $destDir will give the full source and destination paths for each file.
Putting it in parentheses makes it run in a subshell, so the cd won't affect other commands. Coupling cd and find with && means that if cd fails, it won't run find (which would run in the wrong place, generate a list of the wrong file file, and generally cause trouble).
Using -print0 and while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' is a standard weird-filename-safe way of iterating over found files (see BashFAQ #20). Note that if anything in the loop reads from standard input (e.g. cp -i asking for confirmation), it'll steal part of the file list; if this is a worry, use this variant (instead of the pipe) to send the file list over file descriptor #3 instead of standard input:
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0' filepath <&3; do
...
done 3< <(cd "$srcDir" && find . -type f -mtime -1 -print0)
Finally, mkdir -p is used to make sure the destination directory exists, and then cp to copy the file.
i want to write a shell command to sync current directory to backup directory with some requirments. the command i'm using is:
rsync -ptvHS --progress --delete-after --exclude /backup $pwd ~/backup
i want the directory timestamps to be ignored, eventhough i use -t to preserve the file timestamps.
Any idea?
thank you in advance
From the man page:
-t, --times preserve modification times
-O, --omit-dir-times omit directories from --times
-J, --omit-link-times omit symlinks from --times
Seems like you need to add -O to your command.
This is from rsync 3.1.2; you might find your version is too old.
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?
Copy multiple files from remote to local:
$ scp your_username#remote.edu:/some/remote/directory/\{a,b,c\} ./
Copy multiple files from local to remote:
$ scp foo.txt bar.txt your_username#remotehost.edu:~
$ scp {foo,bar}.txt your_username#remotehost.edu:~
$ scp *.txt your_username#remotehost.edu:~
Copy multiple files from remote to remote:
$ scp your_username#remote1.edu:/some/remote/directory/foobar.txt \
your_username#remote2.edu:/some/remote/directory/
Source: http://www.hypexr.org/linux_scp_help.php
From local to server:
scp file1.txt file2.sh username#ip.of.server.copyto:~/pathtoupload
From server to local (up to OpenSSH v9.0):
scp -T username#ip.of.server.copyfrom:"file1.txt file2.txt" "~/yourpathtocopy"
From server to local (OpenSSH v9.0+):
scp -OT username#ip.of.server.copyfrom:"file1.txt file2.txt" "~/yourpathtocopy"
From man 1 scp:
-O Use the legacy SCP protocol for file transfers instead of the SFTP protocol. Forcing the use of the
SCP protocol may be necessary for servers that do not implement SFTP, for backwards-compatibility for
particular filename wildcard patterns and for expanding paths with a ‘~’ prefix for older SFTP
servers.
HISTORY
Since OpenSSH 9.0, scp has used the SFTP protocol for transfers by default.
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
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
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 username#contact.server.de:/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
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 ,.
Copy multiple directories:
scp -r dir1 dir2 dir3 admin#127.0.0.1:~/
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.
scp remote:"[A-C]/[12].txt" local:
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 your-user-id#remotemachine.edu:Folder1/DestinationFolderForFiles/
Uploading an entire directory from a local machine to a remote machine:
~$ scp -r Desktop/dump_files your-user-id#remotemachine.edu:Folder1/DestinationFolderForFiles/
Downloading an entire directory from a remote machine to a local machine:
~/Desktop$ scp -r your-user-id#remote.host.edu: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 user_name#ip.of.remote.machine:/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 ....
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
$
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=${serverHomeDir}'_sqldump_'
backupDbName1='2021-08-27-03-56-somesite-latin2.sql'
backupDbName2='2021-08-27-03-56-somesite-latin1.sql'
backupDbName3='2021-08-27-03-56-somesite-utf8.sql'
backupDbName4='2021-08-27-03-56-somesite-utf8mb4.sql'
scp -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user#server.domain.com:${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
scp -r root#ip-address:/root/dir/ C:\Users\your-name\Downloads\
the -r will let you download all the files inside the dir directory of your remote server
I want to transfer files using rsync to a FTP at the end of every day.
My current rsync script:
rsync -avz /var/spool/asterisk/monitorDONE/MP3 pbciftp:/home/voicefiles/ftp/`date +%Y.%m.%d`
The issue
I want rsync to transfer files that have today's date in their file name; a file might for example be called 20130527_agent_number_campaign.mp3.
So I need rsync to find all files whose file name starts with 20130527 and transfer them.
The most flexible way is probably with find. Something like:
find /var/spool/asterisk/monitorDONE/MP3 -name "*`date +%Y%m%d`*" -print0 | \
rsync -avz --files-from=- --from0 \
/var/spool/asterisk/monitorDONE/MP3 pbciftp:/home/voicefiles/ftp/`date +%Y.%m.%d`
Is there a way to scp all files in a directory recursively to a remote machine and keep their original filenames but don't copy the directory it is in?
dir1/file
dir1/dir2/file2
so the contents of dir1 would be copied only. dir1 would not be created. The dir2 directory would be created with file2 inside though.
I have tried scp -r dir1 remote:/newfolder but it creates dir1 in the /newfolder directory on remote. I don't want it to create that dir1 directory. Just put all the files inside of dir1 into newfolder.
cd dir1
scp -r . remote:/newfolder
This avoids giving scp a chance to do anything with the name dir1 on the remote machine. You might also prefer:
(cd dir1; scp -r . remote:/newfolder)
This leaves your shell in its original directory, while working the same (because it launches a sub-shell that does the cd and scp operations).
This means copy the list of files made by the shell expansion dir1/* to the remote location remote:/newfolder
scp -r dir1/* remote:/newfolder
You can use the dot syntax with relative path.
scp -r dir1/. remote:/newfolder
If the remote directory does not exist it is created.