Question

Is it possible to get files list that were downloaded using scp -r ?

Example:

$ scp -r $USERNAME@HOSTNAME:~/backups/ .

3.tar    100%    5     0.0KB/s   00:00    
2.tar    100%    5     0.0KB/s   00:00    
1.tar    100%    4     0.0KB/s   00:00 

Expected result:

3.tar
2.tar
1.tar

Answer 1

The output that scp generates does not seem to come out on any of the standard streams (stdout or stderr), so capturing it directly may be difficult. One way you could do this would be to make scp output verbose information (by using the -v switch) and then capture and process this information. The verbose information is output on stderr, so you will need to capture it using the 2> redirection operator.

For example, to capture the verbose output do:

scp -rv $USERNAME@HOSTNAME:~/backups/ . 2> scp.output

Then you will be able to filter this output with something like this:

awk '/Sending file/ {print $NF}' scp.output

The awk command simply prints the last word on the relevant line. If you have spaces in your filenames then you may need to come up with a more robust filter.