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 like:

lftp sftp://user@host

and then use the mirror command to recursively download (mirror -R to recursively upload).

Answer 4

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 5

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 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

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 8

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 9

FileZilla is the best client I have used, which of course can use SFTP underneath:

The GUI make is easy to copy over a whole directory.