SCP protocol
Summary
SCP is a legacy file transfer protocol, or rather a command-line program, an analog of rcp that runs over a secure SSH channel. SCP has a very limited feature set and only supports file transfer. In most cases, using SFTP is a better choice.
SCP capabilities
SCP is capable of
- uploading or downloading a single file and
- uploading or downloading a whole directory tree.
Minimal SCP shell
Unlike SFTP, SCP doesn't provide a full remote filesystem API. On the contrary, it only supports basic file-transfer operations such as upload and download of a file or directory.
To overcome this limitation, some SCP clients use other shell commands in addition to ‘scp’ when accessing a remote filesystem. To address this scenario, our SCP module provides a minimal SSH shell that supports a subset of common Unix shell commands and only provides access to the current user's virtual filesystem (just like the SFTP module).
Supported commands include:
ls,
dir,
cd,
pwd,
mkdir,
rmdir,
cp,
mv,
echo,
whoami,
uname,
hostname,
set,
exit.
