Single line sftp from terminal

Question

Several times throughout the day  I may be running a test where I need to look through a log file on a remote server  I ve gotten used to using my terminal to sftp into the remote server and pull the desired log file down to  tmp on my local machine   I was looking through the options today using man sftp in an attempt to figure out a way to run the following commands basically in a single line so that I don t have to type a command  press enter  type a command press enter  etc     what I do now   sftp myuser myserver --mypassword at prompt lcd  tmp get  dir dir dir dir file quit   I found while looking through man sftp a reference to scp which I haven t used before  I feel it may be what I m looking for  but I didn t see a way to specify where I wanted the securely copied file to go    Could someone provide me with a way to get  dir file from a remote server and have it download to  tmp file plus-my-description   I was hoping to be able to run an sftp or scp command similar to a regularUNIX copy like   scp myuser myserver  dir file  tmp file plus-my-description   I m using the built in Terminal in Mac OS X 10 8  Thanks

User · Answer

SCP answer The OP mentioned SCP  so here s that  As others have pointed out  SFTP is a confusing since the upload syntax is completely different from the download syntax  It gets marginally easier to remember if you use the same form  echo  put LOCALPATH REMOTEPATH    sftp USER HOST echo  get REMOTEPATH LOCALPATH    sftp USER HOST  In reality  this is still a mess  and is why people still use  quot outdated quot  commands such as SCP  scp USER HOST REMOTEPATH LOCALPATH scp LOCALPATH USER HOST REMOTEPATH  SCP is secure but dated  It has some bugs that will never be fixed  namely crashing if the server s  bash profile emits a message  However  in terms of usability  the devs were years ahead

User · Answer

Or  echo  put  path to file     sftp  user   host   dir   which would work in both unix and powershell

User · Answer

Update Sep 2017 - tl dr  Download a single file from a remote ftp server to your machine   sftp  user   host   remoteFileName   localFileName    Upload a single file from your machine to a remote ftp server   sftp  user   host   remote dir   lt  lt  lt    put  local file path       Original answer   Ok  so I feel a little dumb  But I figured it out  I almost had it at the top with   sftp user host remoteFile localFile   The only documentation shown in the terminal is this    sftp  user  host  file      sftp  user  host  dir       However  I came across this site which shows the following under the synopsis    sftp  -vC1    -b batchfile    -o ssh option    -s subsystem   sftp server    -B buffer size    -F ssh config    -P sftp server path    -R num requests    -S program   host  sftp   user  host  file  file     sftp   user  host  dir        So the simple answer is you just do   after your user and host then the remote file and local filename  Incredibly simple    Single line  sftp copy remote file   sftp username hostname remoteFileName localFileName sftp kyle kylesserver  tmp myLogFile log  tmp fileNameToUseLocally log   Update Feb 2016  In case anyone is looking for the command to do the reverse of this and push a file from your local computer to a remote server in one single line sftp  command  user  Thariama below posted the solution to accomplish that  Hat tip to them for the extra code   sftp  user   host   remote dir   lt  lt  lt    put  local file path

User · Answer

To UPLOAD a single file  you will need to create a bash script  Something like the following should work on OS X if you have sshpass installed   Usage   sftpx  lt password gt   lt user hostname gt   lt localfile gt   lt remotefile gt    Put this script somewhere in your path and call it sftpx      bin bash  export RND  cat  dev urandom   env LC CTYPE C tr -cd  a-f0-9    head -c 32  export TMPDIR  tmp  RND export FILENAME   basename   4   export DSTDIR   dirname   4    mkdir  TMPDIR cp   3   TMPDIR  FILENAME  export SSHPASS  1 sshpass -e sftp -oBatchMode no -b -  2  lt  lt       lcd  TMPDIR    cd  DSTDIR    put  FILENAME    bye    rm  TMPDIR  FILENAME rmdir  TMPDIR

User · Answer

sftp supports batch files    From the man page   -b batchfile  Batch mode reads a series of commands from an input batchfile instead of stdin    Since it lacks user interaction it should be used in conjunction with non-interactive authentication   A batchfile of  -  may be used to indicate standard input   sftp  will abort if any of the following commands fail  get  put  rename  ln  rm  mkdir   chdir  ls  lchdir  chmod  chown  chgrp  lpwd  df  symlink  and lmkdir   Termination  on error can be suppressed on a command by command basis by prefixing the command  with a  -  character  for example  -rm  tmp blah

User · Answer

A minor modification like below worked for me when using it from within perl and system   call   sftp  user   host   lt  lt  lt    put  local file path   remote file path

[unix] Single line sftp from terminal

SCP answer

Examples related to unix

Examples related to terminal

Examples related to sftp

Examples related to scp