Data security is the mantra of the day. Various Organisations employ Local Area Networks in the premises to ensure fast access and transfer of data between hosts. Transferring these files securely over the network is a big issue. But with linux and the SSH at our disposal, transferring files between hosts has now become fast, easy and very secure – minimizing all eavesdropping. We will need a small utility called scp. It uses the services of the SSH Daemon. Say you need to send a file to another host on your network, then the SSH daemon on that server should be ON.

For sending a file using this scp, we issue the following command:

Here, user is the username of any of the accounts of the computer you are sending the file to, and host is the name or the IP address of the computer. The above command will work fine only if the host to which you are sending the file has it`s SSH damon running on port 22 (as it is the default port).If the target host has it`s SSH daemon listening on some other port, say 352, then you need to use a modified verion of the above command:

Manpages and Indiana Univ KB has more information.
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