Comment by jerf

4 years ago

Was recently encoding my Stargate: SG-1 DVDs to move them to plex. I was encoding it on a system other than what was serving it, so I had to copy it. It's surprisingly difficult to "scp" a file with a colon in it directly.

I also love when you're using bash and you have a file with ! in the name, and you accidentally fail to correctly backslash it, you not only get "bash: !rest_of_filename: event not found", but it also fails to add that command line to the history, so you can't just hit up and fix it. You have to actually go to the mouse and copy and paste.

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jerf

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kerblang  4 years ago

That sounds like... Puzzle time! I had to cheat, sort of, by looking at the man page:

> Local file names can be made explicit using absolute or relative pathnames to avoid scp treating file names containing ':' as host specifiers.

So `scp foo:bar user@host:~` fails because it tries to find the host foo. But `scp ./foo:bar user@host:~` works just fine. I feel kind of stupid for not guessing as much.

philote  4 years ago

Can't you usually just put quotes around the filename and/or path to prevent all those issues?

Edit: nope, just tried it and scp still sees the quoted filename as a host + path

  • warkdarrior  4 years ago

    That is just lazy programming. If the input "foo:bar" is ambiguous, the program should try both interpretations (HOST:FILE and FILE) and then present the user with a prompt that provides sufficient information.

    "Does foo:bar refer to the local file `foo:bar' (size: 102kB, date: 2021-11-11) or to the file `bar' on host `foo' (FQDN: foo.example.com, IP address: 1.2.3.4)?

    1: local file `foo:bar'

    2: file `bar' on remote host `foo'

    Your selection: "