Since I work on remote systems all the time, I use SCP repeatedly to transfer files around. One of the more cumbersome tasks is specifying the remote file or directory location.

So I wrote a helper script to make it easier. It’s called scptarget, and it generates targets for SCP, either the source or the destination.

For instance, if I want to copy a file down from a remote server, I run scptarget like this and copy the output:

$ scptarget file.pl
endot.org:/home/nate/file.pl

Then it’s easy to paste it into my SCP command on my local system:

$ scp endot.org:/home/nate/file.pl .
...

I usually use remotecopy (specifically remotecopy -c) to copy it so that I don’t even have to touch my mouse.

Examples

Here are a few example uses.

First, without any arguments, it targets the current working directory. This is useful when I want to upload something from my local system to where I’m remotely editing files.

$ scptarget
endot.org:/home/nate

Specifying a file targets the file directly.

$ scptarget path/to/file.pl
endot.org:/home/nate/path/to/file.pl

Absolute paths are handled correctly:

$ scptarget /usr/local/bin/file
endot.org:/usr/local/bin/file

Vim SCP targets

Vim supports editing files over SCP, so passing -v in generates a target that it can use:

$ scptarget -v path/to/file.pl
scp://endot.org//home/nate/file.pl

And to edit, just pass that in to Vim:

$ vim scp://endot.org//home/nate/file.pl

IP based targets

Sometimes I need the target to use the IP of the server instead of its hostname. This usually happens with development VMs (a la Vagrant), which are only addressable via IP. Passing -i to scptarget causes it behave this way. Under the hood, it uses getip, which is a script I wrote that prints out the first IP of the current host. If there is no non-private IP, then it will return the first private IP. (I am fully aware that there may be better ways of doing the above. Let me know if you have a better script.)

$ scptarget path/to/file.pl
64.13.192.60:/home/nate/path/to/file.pl

That’s it. I find it incredibly useful and I hope you do too.

Enjoy.