I've suddenly run into a problem with copying over the network with scp and I can't figure if its a bug in a new version or something else. (like something I'm doing wrong suddenly).

I wanted to copy a 2gb directory including all subdirectories to a different server.
In the receiving directory on the receiving server I entered scp -r charles@192.168.1.5:/home/charles .

scp copied alright. It went into a loop. It stopped ultimately when the receiving server announced its hard disk was full. 2gb had become 35gb. Curiously, No directories or files appeared to be duplicated. Nor could I find any unusually big log files. When I rebooted the receiving server it compacted the data down to 16gb - but still much more than existed on the sending server. Rebooting again compacted it again to about half. At this point I could ascertain that scp had not completed copying the original 2gb of data.

After thinking about this all night I tried the experiment again today using two different sets of machines including different linux distributions. I got the same results each time.

These errors were all on machines using 2.6 kernals. I cant remember having any troubles like this with 2.4.

Any ideas?

For that amount of data, use rsync instead.. I only use scp for smaller or one file transfers..