There's too much going on for me to get my noobie head around here. I'm wanting to download all files that end -123.jpg from a multitude of nested directories on a remote server. Some of these directories have spaces in their names. I'm thinking that the command should be along the lines of:
scp -r user@server:/path/to/parent\ directory/*/*/*123\.jpg ./ … where "parent\ directory" is a directory name with a space, and the specified path goes as deep as it can before it splits off to various sub-directories, for example dir/sub dir/[uniquely_id]-123.jpg file. (Note that these sub-directories often contain spaces too, should that affect the * wildcard)
I'm getting 'no match' returned for this, or 'no such file or directory' if I meddle with the space escaping. I'm thinking therefore that it's the recursion or the wildcard that I've got wrong.
Thanks in advance.
4 Answers
Filename escaping with scp is tricky; your arguments get (re)expanded on the remote side. "Interesting" characters have to be double quoted, to avoid special handing by your local shell and by the remote. I would expect both the following to work for you:
scp user@server:'/path/to/parent\ directory/*/*/*123.jpg' ./ scp user@server:'"/path/to/parent directory"/*/*/*123.jpg' ./ If that's confusing, rsync is pretty easy to use (as lothar mentions), and piping tar or cpio through ssh is pretty easy too.
ssh user@server 'cd /path/to/parent\ directory; find -name "*123.jpg" -print0 | cpio -0 -o' | cpio -i -d -v Lacking your server layout for testing I don't know if the following command actually works, but I think rsync would be better than scp in that case, as you can specify in- and exclude patterns. Something like:
rsync -arvzSH --include "*123.jpg" --exclude "*" user@server:/path/to/parent\ directory/ /path/to/target directory/ may work. But you better double check the rsync documentation.
This properly should be done in two parts:
- first find all needed files and copy them to one folder (this does not work if you have the same filenames) - you may do it with one
findand-exec - then send a bunch of files using
scp
scp is not enough advanced to copy folders structure and there is no single command to make a copy of a folders tree.
Also, if you need all files in folders, as you will not be able to select them by wildcards, and you want to preserve folders structure - you may want to use mc = Midnight Commander and its "Shell link".
A work around for scp with wildcards:
for i in "*-123.jpg" do scp $i <user>@<server>:/path/to/destination/ done 
