Mastering the SCP Command for Secure File Transfers on Linux Systems

Jun 07, 2022 •

Brittany Day

1 min read

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Topics Covered

remote access file transfer Linux tools SSH secure copy command line

The scp command makes copying files between Linux computers easy and secure. It uses SSH security, but best of all, it is simple. If you can use cp, you can use scp.

Let’s define a couple of terms: there’s SCP and there’s scp. The uppercase SCP stands for the Secure Copy Protocol. The lowercase scp stands for secure cp. In other words, SCP is a protocol and scp is a program.

scp was designed to be a safe and secure means of copying files between remote Linux computers. It uses SSH to establish secure connections. SSH, or secure shell, is a cryptographic network protocol often used to access and log in to remote Linux computers. On Linux distributions, SSH functionality is provided by OpenSSH.