SSH (SCP) Send Files from Windows to Your Linux Box

Not all of us have the luxury of working both at home and at work on a UNIX based system. However that doesn't mean you can't transfer files safely and securely between the two systems.

Due to a firewall, I'm unable to use FTP on a non-standard port, from my work, however I am able to use SSH to connect to my home computer.

There are many different clients for Windows based systems for SSH connections, however I am fond of PuTTy myself. This document will give you a very brief overview of how to send files from your Windows PC, from a command prompt, to your UNIX style server.

Once you have installed the PuTTy Client (full package not just the putty.exe), open a command prompt on your Windows PC (start menu > run > cmd).

You.re putty client may not be in your path, so change directory to where the program is installed, or copy the 'pscp' executable to your c: for ease of use.

Pscp is the SCP client that comes with the PuTTy package. Normally SCP is used for transferring files securely between UNIX based systems, but it's been ported over with the windows based clients.

The following is an example of how to transfer a file using pscp:

C:pscp -l yourname C:PicturesPictures*.jpg
my.server.com:/home/yourname/tmp/

This will transfer all the jpg files from the Pictures directory one at a time to your server. After you hit enter the server should ask you for your password on that system before it continues. There are many additional options for you to use that will help you make things a bit quicker, like the recursive option, so all subdirectories will get moved also.

Some of the more important options are as follows:

-P 1234 Specifies port 1234 is open for SSH

-l yourname Specifies the username you want to login with

-r Specifies recursive transfer of all subdirectories

-v Specifies verbose mode

-q Specifies quiet mode, and will not display the little statistics bar during the transfer

-C Specifies compress is enabled

-pw yourpass Specifies your password, if you do not use this, it will prompt you instead.

This pretty much covers the basics of transferring files from windows to unix via SCP.

Ken Dennis
Ken.Dennis@Gmail.com
http://KenDennis-RSS.homeip.net/