I know there are some similar questions has been asked here and I did read them… however, I still can not copy a file from a remote machine down to my local computer… I am keep getting error like "No such file or directory"
Here is what I do. I open terminal on MacOS, log in to the remote machine, cd
to the folder I want. Now, under this folder I have a .txt file, say "error.txt", and I want to copy this file down to my local desktop.
I get the directory for my local desktop by just drag the desktop folder into the terminal and I got a path /Users/myname/Desktop
Then I tried the following commands (while under the folder the error.txt is inside the remote machine):
scp -r error.txt /Users/myname/Desktop
or some variations
scp -r error.txt :/Users/myname/Desktop
scp -r error.txt ~/Users/myname/Desktop
scp -r error.txt Users/myname/Desktop
but all of them are keep giving me the error like
cannot create regular file `/Users/myname/Desktop': No such file or directory
Maybe my trouble is how to correct write my local path? But I can cd to my local desktop by using the path /Users/muname/Desktop
while inside my local machine…
Any helps?
Thank you!
Best Answer
You are doing it wrong:
In Terminal DON'T login to the remote machine.
Just run:
In other words: Run SCP locally on your Mac and tell it to retrieve the file from the remote machine. When you are already logged in on the remote machine you need to scp from local (which is the remote machine in that case) to a remote machine (which is your Mac in that case).