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Can you scp a file to multiple locations in the same command?

For example:

scp file.txt [email protected]:, [email protected]:

Or would it be more practical to create a bash script that has all the hosts already in it and it would just take a file as the argument?

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8 Answers 8

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29

Let's say you have a file (destfile.txt) with user@host-values, one on each line. Then you could do like this:

while IFS= read -r dest; do
  scp ourfile.txt "$dest:remote/path/"
done <destfile.txt
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3
  • This works! Still a handful to type out though. Perhaps there's a way to simplify that.
    – Andrew
    Sep 22, 2011 at 21:02
  • 3
    @Andrew, if you change the for-loop into while read dest; do, it will read from standard input. Put it in a script and feed the destfile.txt into it (e.g., ./thescript.sh <destfile.txt).
    – Kusalananda
    Sep 22, 2011 at 21:19
  • I'm doing the former, but with rsync and some of my nodes are not updating. Any idea why?
    – Soubriquet
    Sep 22, 2018 at 17:50
9

Looks like a job for parallel-scp(n)(t) - this implements a set of commands that allow for scp commands to be run on multiple systems at once. It will allow for the copying of files in parallel to a set of machines.

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4 
cat file.txt | tee >(ssh [email protected] "cat > file.txt") \
                   >(ssh [email protected] "cat > file.txt")

tar cz file1 file2 file3 | tee >(ssh [email protected] "tar xz") \
                               >( ... )
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2

If you have a consistent naming convention going on for multiple servers, you can do something neat like:

for x in st1-abc-{11..20}.acme.com; do scp filez.tgz user@$x; done
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1

Another alternative (and a one-liner) would be to instead use pdsh to connect to each target node and trigger a get from there:

pdsh -w^destfile.txt scp hostname:/path/to/file /path/to/destfile

This of course requires one more information (the local host) and different user rights, but you avoid looping in bash and using indirection to read the file.

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1

You can also use xargs.

hosts.txt :

[email protected]:
[email protected]:

Then run this command :

cat hosts.txt | xargs -I HOST scp file.txt HOST
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1

You can use pssh or parallel-scp packages for ubuntu

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/parallel-scp.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/parallel-ssh.1.html

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1
  • Welcome to Super User! Please quote the essential parts of the answer from the reference link(s), as the answer can become invalid if the linked page(s) change.
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Jul 3, 2020 at 12:03
0

Here's another option, with a one line shell script.

cscp.sh 20337.patch < hosts.txt

It uses two files, one for the loop, and one for the server host list. It reads $1 for the first parameter from the CLI as the filename to SCP

cscp.sh

#!/bin/bash
while read host; do
  scp $1 ${host}:
done

hosts.txt

project-prod-web1
project-prod-web2
project-prod-web3

Usage

Copy file to multiple hosts:

cscp.sh file < hosts
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