scp gives "not a regular file"

Question

I have a problem when using scp on Linux, it says "not a regular file". I looked at other questions/answers about that, but I can't find out what's wrong... I wrote:

scp aa@aa:/home/pictures/file.fits .

to copy file.fits from aa@aa, /home/pictures to the current directory. I also tried without using /home/, but it didn't work neither...

Do you understand what's wrong?

Answer 1

I just tested this and found at least 3 situations in which scp will return not a regular file:

1. File is actually a directory
2. File is a named pipe (a.k.a. FIFO)
3. File is a device file

Case #1 seems most likely. If you meant to transfer an entire directory structure with scp use the -r option to indicate recursive copy.

Answer 2

"/home/pictures/file.fits" must name an actual filesystem object on the remote server. If it didn't, scp would have given a different error message.

I see that FITS is an image format. I suppose "/home/pictures/file.fits" is the name of a directory on the remote server, containing FITS files or something like that.

To copy a directory with scp, you have to supply the "-r" flag:

scp -r aa@aa:/home/pictures/file.fits . 

Answer 3

One way this error can occur is if you have a space before the first path like below:

scp myUserName@HostName: /path/to/file  /path/to/new/file                            ^

To fix, just take the space out:

scp myUserName@HostName:/path/to/file  /path/to/new/file

Answer 4

simple steps you need to follow

1)scp -r user@host:/var/www/html/projectFolder /var/www/html/localsystem-project-folder

2)scp -r user@host:/var/www/html/projectFolder/filename.php /var/www/html/localsystem-project-folder/

here -r is for recursive traverse the director will help you without any error.