Linux – SCP command with spaces and a comma

linuxscp

been having problems all day with this single scp command. Been searching and asking people etc etc. 

$ scp -P portNumber /ReferenceFiles/CompanyA,The/Some\ DirectoryWithA\ Space/Game user@server:/ReferenceFiles/CompanyA/Game

I tried to do a file within the directory, but get file does not exists, and if I try to do the scp command on the directory I get "not a regular file".

I have tried using double back slashes for the spaces, using single and double quotes. I'm really new to this and have been thrown in expecting to know this stuff when I was told I would be doing mostly PHP and Flash…

Any help or suggestions welcome.

Thanks

Best Answer

One of the easiest ways to get around character escaping on the command-line (if that's the cause of the problem) is to use tab-completion to let it fill in the "awkward" characters; depending on how full your /ReferenceFiles directory is, you might be able to do something like

  scp -P portNumber /Ref<tab>CompanyA<tab>Some<tab>Game/file user@server:...

Alternately, you can use a ? instead of a character, provided there aren't going to be too many conflicting file/directory names:

 scp -P portNumber /ReferenceFiles/CompanyA,The/Some?DirectoryWithA?Space/Game/file ...

For directories, you need to use the -r option to scp (its omission is why you got the "not a regular file" error).

Lastly, could it be that the destination on the server doesn't exist as typed, and that's the source of the error (and not the source file)?

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