Home > Secure copy

The term scp can refer to one of two related things:

• A protocol -- basically identical to the BSD rcp protocol, but run over secure shell (SSH) rather than rsh . (compare sftp protocol)

• A command line program to perform secure copying. Whether the scp tool uses the scp protocol or the sftp protocol depends on the version and variant of the tool.

Scp is the secure analog of the rcp command. Unlike rcp, data is encrypted during transfer, to avoid potential packet sniffers extracting usable information from the data packets.

scp is a command line tool provided with SSH and OpenSSH. Alternative tools which also support scp are available.

In its basic form the syntax of scp is like the syntax of cpcp is the command entered in a Unix shell to copy a file from one place on a computer to another place on the same filesystem. The original file remains unchanged, and the new file may have the same or a different name. Since Unix does not rely on file ex:

After entering the command the remote host will ask user's password and the copy process starts.

A more comprehensive tool/protocol for transferring files over SSH is sftp.

See also

• telnetTelnet is a network protocol used on the Internet. IETF document STD 8 (aka and ) states: : The purpose of the TELNET Protocol is to provide a fairly general, bi-directional, eight- bit byte oriented communications facility. It is typically used to provid, ftp
• rsh , rcp
• SSH, SSH file transfer protocol (sftp)