Where did scp put these files?

Question

I ran an scp command to download some files from an SSH server. Instead of using the . to put it in the current folder, I accidentally typed *. It looks like scp copied the files and put them somewhere. My command was similar to this:

$moshe> scp username@server.com:~/SomeDirectory/SubDir/* *

I meant to type something more like this:

$moshe> scp username@server.com:~/SomeDirectory/SubDir/* .

Where would they be?

Answer 1

Your shell would've expanded the * to all files in the current directory. scp takes multiple source files and a single destination path (the same as cp), so it will have copied username@server.com:~/SomeDirectory/Subdir/* and all the files in the current directory except the last one, to the last one. So, assuming the file list in the current directory hasn't changed, check which directory is listed last:

$ ls | tail -1

Answer 2

It put them in one subdirectory of your current directory.

For example, if your current directory is something like:

[andcoz@...] ~/test> ls -F
e  f  r  s  v  w  Z/

Note that Z is a directory. When you write:

scp username@server.com:~/SomeDirectory/SubDir/* *

The shell expansion will transform your command in something like:

scp username@server.com:~/SomeDirectory/SubDir/* e  f  r  s  v  w  Z 

So all your files from remote machine and all local directory files will be copied in Z directory.

Answer 3

If there were no files¹ in the current directory, then scp successively copied all the remote files to a file called *. In other words, the file ./* now contains the last remote file in alphabetical order. If any of the remote files were directories, scp displayed an error message but went on copying.

If there was a single regular file in the current directory, then scp successively copied all the remote files to that one file.

If there were at least two entries in the current directory, what happened depends on the file type of the last entry in alphabetical order (the last element in the list if you run ls).

• If it was a regular file, scp aborted with the error “Not a directory”.
• If it was a directory, scp copied all the remote files and all the files in the current directory except for that last entry into said directory.

I recommend mounting remote directories with sshfs or using rsync -av or rsync -auv (without wildcards) to copy files. scp can be error-prone at times.

¹ _{Except for files whose name begin with a ..}