scp or sftp copy multiple files with single command

Question

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?

Answer 1

Copy multiple files from remote to local:

$ scp [email protected]:/some/remote/directory/\{a,b,c\} ./

Copy multiple files from local to remote:

$ scp foo.txt bar.txt [email protected]:~
$ scp {foo,bar}.txt [email protected]:~
$ scp *.txt [email protected]:~

Copy multiple files from remote to remote:

$ scp [email protected]:/some/remote/directory/foobar.txt \
[email protected]:/some/remote/directory/

Source: http://www.hypexr.org/linux_scp_help.php

Answer 2

From local to server:

scp file1.txt file2.sh [email protected]:~/pathtoupload

From server to local:

scp -T [email protected]:"file1.txt file2.txt" "~/yourpathtocopy"

Answer 3

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 [email protected]:/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

Answer 4

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