Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Wondering whether it's possible to specify a sort order when transferring files with scp.
For example:
$ scp -r "user@host:/path/to/download/" .
[... files download in a seemingly random order ...]
Since perhaps this may be related to how scp functions, is there some way to configure ssh on the source(server)-side so that files are transfered, for example, in ascending filename order?
I whould solve the problem with tar and the pipe-transparency of ssh. An example can be seen below, the remote PC is named bar. Before the test, I created three empty files in /tmp/foo by executing ssh bar 'mkdir /tmp/foo ; touch /tmp/foo/{a,b,c}'.
$ ssh bar 'cd /tmp/foo ; ls | sort -r | tar -cT -' | tar -xv
c
b
a
$ ls -l a b c
-rw-r--r-- 1 dnet dnet 0 nov 29 17:07 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 dnet dnet 0 nov 29 17:07 b
-rw-r--r-- 1 dnet dnet 0 nov 29 17:07 c
The -T flag of tar makes it read filenames to pack from the next parameter, and - means the standard input. Now you just need to pipe the name of the files into it, which can come from ls (as in the example) or find for trickier tasks. With this setup, you can use sort to indicate the exact order the files will be transmitted through SSH (in this case, -r sorted files in reverse alphabetic order). The -v is only added to the final, unpacking tar, so that the order is visible.
sort in the bar remote command somehow accomplish this?
Nov 29, 2012 at 17:45
scp -- both send metadata and contents for each file, they just use a different "protocol". I guess you could iterate over the results, but then you should take care of files with whitespace in their names.
One can achieve file transfer with alphabetical order using rsync:
rsync -P -e ssh -r user@remote_host:/some_path local_path
P allows partial downloading, e sets the SSH protocol and r downloads recursively.
In case this helps someone, I provided a simple solution here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23067175
Still waiting for a cleverer way to do it!
