SCP transfer only modified files

Question

I'm using below command to transfer files cross server

scp -rc blowfish /source/directory/* [email protected]:/destination/directory

Is there a way to transfer only files modified files just like update command for cp?

Cristian Ciupitu · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-04 13:24:26Z

64

rsync is your friend.

rsync -ru /source/directory/* [email protected]:/destination/directory

If you want it to delete files at the destination that no longer exist at the source, add the --delete option.

Cristian Ciupitu

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answered May 23, 2013 at 14:35

Flup

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5

Although, if you are syncing to a web server and that server caches HTML, you might not want to use --delete, since visitors on a stale page might request an asset that no longer exists.
– Jackson
May 24, 2016 at 21:56
@Jackson a clean process will not include variable data like caches or configs in the sources.
– Chris Pillen
Nov 17, 2018 at 7:40
In some cases I have deal with servers outside of my domain that don't have rsync but have scp. Is there a comparable solution, even if it needs a few lines of scripting?
– jacobq
Dec 21, 2018 at 14:58
1

The answer is helpful, but the question was can this be achieved with scp itself.
– Mladen B.
Nov 2, 2019 at 20:02
1

@MladenB. How it can be achieved by scp?
– Kamran Hosseini
Dec 13, 2019 at 4:48

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Dave M · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-20 12:26:25Z

10

Generally one asks for scp because there is a reason. I.e. can't install rsyncd on the target.

files=`find . -newermt "-3600 secs"`

for file in $files
do
       sshpass -p "" scp "$file" "root@$IP://usr/local/www/current/$file"
done

Dave M

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answered Mar 19, 2019 at 13:29

Angelo Dureghello

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Note that "-cmin N" is maybe a tad simpler. While N is a number of minutes the argument can be also a fractional number, e.g. "-cmin -0.5" gives you the files created in the last 30 seconds. In my experiments the argument had to be negative, tough.
– Andreas Spindler
Feb 16 at 9:07

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