SCP problem -

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sat, 24 Nov 2012 15:19:41 -0500
"Bob Goodwin - Zuni, Virginia, USA" <bobgoodwin at wildblue.net> wrote:
>     Is there something wrong with this command?
> 
>         [root at box9 simple]# scp -r  bobg at box8:/home/bobg/
>         /run/media/bobg/Simple/Box8BkU
> 
>     I would like to copy the contents [roughly 44G per du -h] of
>     /home/bobg/ on box8 to an external USB 500G hard drive. The
> problem is that it appears to be trying to keep recopying the files
> until the 500 gigs is reached.

First of all, are you sure about the destination path? My external USB
hard drives get mounted under /media, not /run/media.

However, your problem seems to be in the circular links in the
source /home/bobg/. Somewhere under the directory tree, there is
probably a soft link pointing to its own parent directory (or several
levels up). Since scp follows symbolic links (read about -r option in
man scp), it gets into a loop, copying one directory subtree over and
over and over. Apparently scp lacks an option to disable following
symbolic links, so there is no easy way to fix this.

Either look into the source directory to find and delete all looped
links before you start copying (this may be buried somewhere deep
inside some hidden dot-something directory), or use rsync instead, like
others have suggested.

I had the same problem on several occasions before, and most commonly I
first created a .tar file of the source, and then scp the .tar over to
the destination. Tar typically preserves the whole tree intact, along
with loops, permissions, attributes, etc.

HTH, :-)
Marko