Question

Hi I have been given a task of copying files from a given server to local machine. Even I can do it manually using the command line but I need to write a script to automate it. I dont have any clue how to do it using shell, how to give the password which we would have done manually. I went through other posts but did not get the precise answer.

Are there better ways than using SCP command?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The preferred + more secure way to do this is to set up ssh key pairs

That being said, if there’s a specific need to supply passwords as part of your shell script, you can use pscp, which is part of putty-tools:

If you are on ubuntu, you can install it by:

sudo apt-get install putty-tools

(Or use equivalent package managers depending on your system)

Here’s an example script of how to use pscp:

#!/bin/bash

password=hello_world
login=root
IP=127.0.0.1
src_dir=/var/log
src_file_name=abc.txt
dest_folder=/home/username/temp/

pscp -scp -pw $password $login@$IP:$src_dir/$src_file_name $dest_folder

This copies /var/log/abc.txt from the specified remote server to your local /home/username/temp/