How To Use the scp Command on Linux
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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.