Secure copy - Definition and Overview

Secure Copy or scp is a means of securely transferring computer files between a local and a remote host or between two remote hosts, using the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol.

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 cp:

scp fileToMove user@host:folder/file

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

• telnet, ftp
• rsh, rcp
• SSH, SSH file transfer protocol (sftp)