Not counting email, the two most common ways to copy files to another machine are FTP (File Transfer Protocol)and SCP (Secure copy). Here we will discuss both.
FTP has been around for many years and is still used quite a lot today. However, standard FTP does have a serious drawback. The data is sent in what is called "clear text". This means a knowledgeable person could obtain the data under the right conditions. We will talk about this a bit later.
We will assume an FTP server has already been set up and is available for this exercise. Normally you would use ftp
command from one machine (the client) to another (the server). However, for this example I am using just one machine. The command to start an FTP session is ftp server-name
where server-name can be a host name known on your network, or a numeric IP address. For this example, I have created a file in /tmp
named f1.txt
and a file in /home/jklewis
named f5.txt
.
Most Linux distributions...