I need to transfer all *.png from different directories from a remote server BUT preserving the full path of each .png file because all .png files have the same name.
scp -r -e server:coverages/K4me3/*/pos/output/*/*.png Desktop/
While coping it rewrites already existing .png files because the names od them are the same in different directories. I want to preserve the full directory path,s o that when copying, the .png files are copied within their own directories.
SCP doesn't preserve the paths of files on its own, as you have discovered.
You'll probably want to use rsync to do this, since rsync does preserve paths
I think the command would be:
rsync -a -r -v -z server_config:/path/to/root/directory/on/server [destination_folder]
This is the reverse of this question: scp a folder to a remote system keeping the directory layout
Alternatively, and as the comments suggest, you can write a script to get all of the files or lower level directories (with absolute path) and call an scp transfer on each of them. Here is a script that I at one point used to copy files in this way:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool
from subprocess import call
from functools import partial
root = # Root Directory
files = [
root + # Sub 1,
root + # Sub 2,
root + # Sub 3,
root + # Sub etc,
]
command_s = "scp -r -v -c arcfour -F /path/to/.ssh/config Server:"
command_e = " Output_Dir/"
max_processes = 4
# Transfer the files 4 at a time because my computer is busy with other stuff
cmds = []
for filename in files:
cmds.append(command_s + filename + command_e)
pool = Pool(max_processes)
for i, returncode in enumerate(pool.imap(partial(call, shell=True), cmds)):
if returncode != 0:
print ("%d command failed: %d" % (i, returncode))
