SCP not recognizing destination file path

Question

I want to copy my environment files in the dir .env/ from my local machine to my remote machine.

According to this answer, I tried the following but got an error:

stephen@desktop:~/Projects/finance$ scp -r .env root@<MY_IP_INSTANCE>:/finance
scp: /finance/.env: Not a directory

I verified the directory exists on my local machine:

stephen@desktop:~/Projects/finance$ ls -al | grep .env
drwxrwxr-x  2 stephen stephen      4096 Nov 12 14:25 .env

And I verified it does not exist on my remote machine:

root@localhost:~/finance# ls -al |grep .env
root@localhost:~/finance#

According to the online resources, the source path should remove the trailing / from the file path if I want to copy the entire folder. I've hit insanity where I've tried every combination of source and destination paths.

EDIT: Here is the linode docs which is the VPS I am using. Seems like conflicting information.

EDIT2: Here is what worked

stephen@desktop:~/Projects/finance$ scp -r .env root@173.255.210.31:finance
.dev.local    100%  712    20.0KB/s   00:00    
.prod         100%  595    21.2KB/s   00:00     
.prod.local   100%  710    24.7KB/s   00:00     
.dev          100%  597    20.2KB/s   00:00

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 12 '21 at 23:28

1

You need to remove the slash. What you wrote refers to the root folder on the other machine. From your verification steps it's clear though that you meant the home folder of root (/root):

scp -r .env root@<MY_IP_INSTANCE>:finance
# or, explicitly
scp -r .env root@<MY_IP_INSTANCE>:/root/finance

answered Nov 12 '21 at 23:28

Christian Fritz

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Thanks! So it worked but I'm unclear why the `root@:finance` is different from `root@:/~/finance` which I also tried. – sat1017 Nov 12 '21 at 23:41
@sat1017 You should use ~/finance rather than /~/finance – Farhad Bharucha Nov 12 '21 at 23:48
1

`/~/` is literally a folder called `~` in the root of the filesystem. The tilde is only resolves as a special character right at the beginning of a path as far as I know. – Christian Fritz Nov 13 '21 at 00:13

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 12 '21 at 23:46

You need to provide the path as /usr/{username}/Projects/finance.

So your command should be

scp -r .env root@<MY_IP_INSTANCE>:/usr/{yourUserName}/Projects/finance

you can find the path by going to the finance folder and running

pwd

By default the path being used is /finance instead of the ~/finance which means it is looking for the finance folder in the root directory('/').

SCP not recognizing destination file path

2 Answers2