Hello,

I am using sftp for the first time. I want the output of the command ls -lrt on my local directory from the remote directory?

is that possible? if yes could you please explain with an example?

Thanks,
Priyanka

in an sftp session, you can type "help" to get a list of acceptable commands.

lls would list the list of files/scripts we have in the local directory. What i want to achieve is how do I get the list of files along with their file size (the files which are on remote server)to my local directory?

For that I need to store the output of ls -lrt that I execute when I am in the sftp mode to a file say, but unable to do so.

Can you help?

oh, i see. use ssh for that, e.g.:


you'll be prompted for your password, but then the listing will be sent to STDOUT (your screen). you could also save the output to a variable, or redirect it to a local file.


you should set up public/private SSH keys, so that you can SSH around w/o having to enter passwords.

tried as suggested, throws the below error

Could not chdir to home directory : A file or directory in the path name does not exist

what do you exactly mean by should setup public/private ssh keys ? Is there some kind of configuration file or package thats need to be installed on the unix box ?

You can do something similar in sftp (in case you haven't got ssh access, but sftp-only). Interactively (when you sit in front of the terminal)
or in batch mode in a script
In both cases, you may want to remove the sftp> prompt from the session logfile:
Regarding "Public key authentication" - useful for example in batch mode when you' don't want to be prompted for password - read the AUTHENTICATION section of the ssh man page. Setting it up doesn't require any additional software installation: basically it uses ssh-keygen and ssh-agent. Plenty of tutorials out there! Hope this helps.

thanks it was helpful!!

You can create a public and private SSH key pair (which amounts to a couple of text files in your home dir), that you would use as authentication for SSH. You can do this using couple of commands that are part of the OpenSSH package (and are thus likely already on your Linux box).

First create the key pair on host A:
if you now look in your ~/.ssh directory, you should see at least these files:
Create a key pair on host B (the exact same command as above):
Back on host A, then copy the public key over to host B:
you will be prompted for user's password on "host-B" so that the key can be copied.

Then test logging into host B from host A without getting prompted for a password:
if it works correctly, you should not get prompted for a password (obviously) and the hostname command should be executed remotely (printing "host-B" or whatever the remote host's hostname is) , on host-B and then return you to the host-A prompt.

if you have problems logging in w/o password, double-check the permissions on the ~/.ssh dir and the key files. They should be owned by you and the .ssh dir and the private key should only be readable by the owner:
Note that you can leave off the -oPasswordAuthentication=no option to ssh normally, we're just try to force it to skip that auth mech, if your ssh is configured to use passwords first.

Hi,

How to change mode to binary while transferring files using sftp ?

Thanks,
Priyanka

The SSH/SFTP protocol is different from FTP and you don't need to change the transfer mode from ASCII to BINARY and viceversa. The files are transferred without modifications and this behaviour matches the binary mode transfer. The sftp coming from openssh-client, the default in Linux, acts like this.

Nevertheless, some proprietary ssh/sftp packages added the "ascii" command but only to manage the newline characters conversion automatically, if they are treated differently in the local and the remote machine. Instead, in Linux you transfer the files unmodified and eventually change the newline characters using the dos2unix command after the files have been transferred and stored onto your local machine.

Is there something that makes you think that SFTP is not transferring in binary mode? Or are you just asking this out of habit, as colucix has pointed out?