using scp renaming all files

Question

I am sending files from one server to another using scp . I need to rename files after sending that .So I use following command for each file

scp original-hc.db user@host:/dir/original-hc_1.db

I want to send all files using a single command with renaming files . Like

scp *.db user@host:/dir/(actual file name before extension)_1.db

Answer 1

This can easily be achieved with a loop

for f in *.db
do
    scp "$f" user@host:/dir/"${f%.db}"_1.db
done

The ${f%.db} construct strips off the .db suffix from $f.

Answer 2

scp can't rename files when copying multiple files to a directory, so you'll need to use some other tool in addition or instead to perform the pattern-based renaming.

If you have SFTP access and not just SCP access, then you can use SSHFS to make the remote files appear on your local machine. This allows you to use any file copy-and-renaming tool.

mkdir mnt
sshfs user@host:/dir
pax -rw -pe -s'/\.db$/_1.db/' *.db mnt
fusermount -u mnt

Instead of pax (which is POSIX but sometimes not installed by default on Linux though it's always available as a package), you might use GNU or BSD tar, zsh's zcp, etc. Or just a loop that does the copy:

for x in *.db; do
  cp -p "$x" "mnt/${x%.db}_1.db"
done

You can use the loop method even if you don't have SSHFS, but then you have to use scp in the loop.

for x in *.db; do
  scp -p "$x" "user@host:/dir/${x%.db}_1.db"
done

Setting up an SSH connection for each time can be a little slow. With OpenSSH, you can open the connection once and then piggyback on it. See Using an already established SSH channel

Another method (requiring full shell access on the server) is to archive the files and copy the archive, and apply a renaming step when archiving or when extracting. For example, if you have GNU tar locally (which is always the case on non-embedded Linux and often available, perhaps as gtar, on other unix variants):

tar -cf - --transform '/\.db$/_1.db/ *.db | ssh user@host 'cd /dir && tar -xf -'

With BSD tar, replace --transform by -s. If you have a very limited tar locally but GNU tar or BSD tar on the server, you can do the renaming on the server side instead.

You might want to insert a step of compression if the network bandwidth is the bottleneck. With the archive method, you can insert steps in the pipeline:

tar -czf - --transform '/\.db$/_1.db/ *.db | ssh user@host 'cd /dir && gunzip | tar -xf -'

Or you can do the compression at the SSH level, by passing the -C option to ssh, sshfs or scp.