It’s been over two years since I wrote remotecopy and I still use it every day. The most recently added feature is the -c option, which will remove the trailing newline from the copied data if it only contains one line. I found myself writing little scripts that would only output one line with the intent of using that output to build a command line on a different system, and the extra newline at the end often messed up the new command.

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:

Problem # I copy and paste all the time. Most of the time, I copy short pieces of information that are too long to type (I’m lazy) but too short to setup anything more complex (wget, scp, etc.). For a while, this was fine as most of my copy targets were either local to my system or in a terminal window on a remote server. However, as I increased my use of splits in tmux and windows in vim, highlighting remote text with my mouse became horribly cumbersome.