How do I get an entire directory in sftp?

Question

I'm just learning to use sftp, and I want to copy a directory from the remote computer to my local computer. If I try

get [directory]

it gives me this error:

Cannot download non-regular file: /home/mpirocch/Documents

get -R doesn't work, either.

Answer 1

Use the -R (recursive) flag:

get -R .

Answer 2

Use:

scp -r mpirocch@my-server:/home/mpirocch/Documents Documents

Answer 3

Use lftp:

lftp sftp://user@host

Then, within lftp, cd into the directory you want to copy, and use the mirror command to recursively download the selected directory, like this:

mirror

This command accepts options and arguments:

mirror [OPTIONS] [source [target]]

For example, the -R (or --reverse) option will cause it to upload the local directory tree to the remote directory:

mirror -R

See the lftp(1) man page at the project’s site or at Debian.org for other commands and options.

Answer 4

well this little guide should help, mirror a remote server to local folder with lftp

lftp sftp://user:[email protected]:22 -e 'mirror --verbose --use-pget-n=8 -c /remote/path /local/path'

• sftp:// = uses SFTP protocol
• mirror = mirror mode
• verbose = shows the files being downloaded
• use-pget-n = number of segments, realy useful to speed up big files
• parallel = downloads multiplier files at the same time

if you want to download files in parallel switch out use-pget-n=8 with --parallel=8

hope this helps anyone needing to mirror a remote folder to a local folder

Answer 5

Don't use the sftp program directly if you can find something better. For Linux, many file managers (at least Nautilus and Dolphin, the GNOME and KDE ones) support sftp natively, and there's always sshfs. For windows, there's WinSCP, and probably others. The point of all of these is to let you access files over sftp as if they were on a regular filesytem, so you don't have to care that you're accessing them over sftp.

Answer 6

get -r [directory]

gets [directory] and everything under it, where r stands for recursive. I found this just by typing help from sftp.

Answer 7

Try mget instead of get.

Clarification: mget will work if you are inside the directory you want to copy; if you do something like this:

sftp> cd dir_to_get
sftp> mget *

it will get all the files in that directory. However, it will not recursively get the contents of any subdirectories.

Answer 8

As with cp:

scp -rp user@host:/path/to/dir dir

The above will preserve times and modes of the original files and subdirectories. This is especially useful for the retrieval of backups.

Answer 9

I have Java dist folder in remote server, where i have following tree:

- dist
--- Audio.jar
--- README
--- lib
----- lib.jar

Goal is: I want to use SFTP? And put them in /tmp/<>

Step 1. sftp remoteuser@ip

Step 2. cd /var/tmp

Step 2. lmkdir /tmp/dist; lmkdir /tmp/dist/lib

Step 3. lcd /tmp/dist

Step 4. mget *

Step 5. lcd /tmp/dist/lib

Step 6. mget *

Step 7. finally i have my goal

$ ls
Audio.jar  lib  README.TXT

Answer 10

I recently solved this with lftp:

lftp -c '
open sftp://USER:[email protected]:22
mirror --verbose --use-pget-n=8 -c /remote/catalogue/ /local/catalogue/
'

Inspired by this post.

Answer 11

sftp -r user@myserver:/some_remote_directory /tmp/localdir
(it's important to specify the destination directory, otherwise it will just log in)

... worked for me (on Ubuntu 23)

or interactively:

sftp user@myserver
cd some_remote_directory
mget *

(mget stands for "multiple get" and the *-wildcard to get all files)