[NBLUG/talk] Syntax of scp

[Mitch Patenaude]

The tarball will have the same absolute  or relative paths it was 
created with...  so maybe
you want to do something like

$ cd $HOME
$ tar cfvz /tmp/home.tgz .
{......}
$ scp /tmp/home.tgz otherhost:.

Basically.. don't use an absolute path the home dir

$ tar cfvs /tmp/home.tgz /home/melvyn

because when you untar it, it will try to use the new path.  I think 
there are arguments that will keep the path from being interpreted as 
absolute, and maybe that's the default behavior now.  It used to be 
that absolute paths were default, and a security breach was possible if 
you could get root to untar a hostile file with (say) a new /etc/passwd 
in it.

  -- Mitch


On Sunday, Feb 29, 2004, at 08:12 US/Pacific, Todd Cary wrote:

> Mitch -
>
> My goal is to tar ( -czvf ) /home /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, scp it 
> to my temporary computer that has a new Fedora Core 1 OS installed.  
> Then I want to untar the file and have the temporary computer handle 
> the work while I rebuild my production system.
>
> Never having done this before, I am not sure if the relative paths 
> will be restored when I untar the file.
>
> Todd
>
> Mitch Patenaude wrote:
>
>> scp has an argument structure that is (purposefully) the same (or 
>> really a subset) as that of rcp.  It was thought of as a drop-in 
>> replacement.
>>
>> So.. the syntax for destination (or source) files is
>>
>> [[user@]hostname:]path
>>
>> without the syntactic key of the :at the end, the parser was treating 
>> it just like a filename since 192.168.0.12 is valid file name.  If 
>> neither of the source and destination are "remote", it behaves just 
>> like cp.
>>
>> And you can specify multiple sources and one destination, all on 
>> different machines, e.g.:
>>
>> scp calisto:index.html john at europa:/tmp/logo.png 
>> widgets at www.example.com:public_html/NewProducts/.
>>
>> If you specify more than one host.. the authentications happen in the 
>> order they appear on the command line.  I like to set up 
>> $HOME/known_hosts with keys so that authentication is automatic, but 
>> it will fall back on password authenication.
>>
>> Something else to note:  If there is no path, or if the path is 
>> relative, then it's interpreted as relative to the home directory of 
>> the user.  If the file isn't in the home dir, you can use an absolute 
>> path.
>>
>>   -- Mitch
>>
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>>
>>
>
> -- 
>
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