Copying Files From My Laptop To My External HDD That Is Connected To Raspberry PI

Bryzey · 08-28-2013, 02:21 AM

Hi All,

Very new to Linux and trying to switch from GUI to CLI for getting things done.

Currently I can just drag the files across from the Laptop to the PI using GUI but I am trying to learn the command line so hopefully someone can help me out.

scp home/brian/testfile root@ipadress: /var/media/My\ Book/

Whenever I try this command I keep getting an error message:

scp: ambiguous target

What I am missing here? Is it something to do with the mounted HDD?

Thanks!

evo2 · 08-28-2013, 02:28 AM

Hi,

there should not be any space between the colon and the destination path. Ie, try

Code:

scp home/brian/testfile root@ipadress:/var/media/My\ Book/

HTH,

Evo2.

Firerat · 08-28-2013, 02:30 AM

ipaddress is a 'place holder' you need to enter the IP address of your Pi

example root@192.168.0.5

some other things you may like to look at

sftp , rsync and sshfs

Doh,

totally missed the : ( lack of )

Bryzey · 08-28-2013, 02:35 AM

Thanks evo2.

That was one of the two problems.

The other problem is that I did not have the /var/media/My\ Book/ in quotes.

Here is the working command in the end.

Code:

scp home/brian/testfile root@ipadress:"/var/media/My\ Book/"

evo2 · 08-28-2013, 02:43 AM

Hi,

since you escaped the space in "My Book" (using the backslash) I'm surprised that you needed the quotes... but I generally don't have spaces in file or directory names, and I typically use rsync instead of scp. Anyway good luck on the command line and welcome to LQ.

Evo2.

pwalden · 08-29-2013, 11:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by evo2

Hi,

since you escaped the space in "My Book" (using the backslash) I'm surprised that you needed the quotes... but I generally don't have spaces in file or directory names, and I typically use rsync instead of scp. Anyway good luck on the command line and welcome to LQ.

Evo2.

Yes, I found that on a remote scp target, you have to double-escape whitespace/wildcard characters. The first escape, in this case the quotes, was to prevent whitesapce processing on the originating system and have it send the destination string to the target system. The second escape, in this case the backslashes, is observed on the target system.