hello - I'm a total newbie to linux and, as such, come face to face with obstacles daily. My first question on this forum is: im trying to scp a file from windows to linux. how do I do this? Thanks in advance!

winscp or cygwin

I use cygwin since I prefer a linux CLI rather than a GUI.

Hi,

winSCP can do that.

Hope this helps.

Edit: too slooooow

thanks all - i just tried both and no luck. what I'm doing is: scp user@fromhost:filename user@tohost:filename and replacing the scp with cygwin winscp - is this command correct?

Hi,

Although you can use the CLI, winSCP is basically a GUI. Documentation can be found here: winSCP Documentation.

Hope this helps.

Winscp is a Windows GUI, there is no command to type in, you just fill in the boxes for user and host and then browse the server like an FTP client.
Cygwin is a Linux-style CLI that runs in Windows. From the Cygwin terminal you can run scp like normal.

Your command is also a bit off as well, either your fromhost or your tohost has to be local, you can't use SCP on machine 1 to transfer a file between machine 2 and machine 3. The command would be "scp filename user@host:filename" if you want to transfer from the local machine to a remote machine, or "scp user@host:filename filename" if you want to transfer from a remote machine to the local machine.