scp copy over ssh doesn't work - permission denied error, please?

Question

It's driving me nuts! I just want to transfer one simple file from laptop to server.

I'm using ubuntu on both machines.

So I have:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 sandro    414622 2011-10-14 23:42 sandrophoto-html.tar.gz

And I'm sending it using:

sudo scp -P XXXX sandrophoto-html.tar.gz usern@server.local:/media/xx/xx/xx

And I get: scp: /media/xx/xx/xx/sandrophoto-html.tar.gz: Permission denied

p.s. I might be doing this other way around - I want to send file tar.gz that is located on my desktop, to remote server into the folder /media/yadayda

Answer 1

You have things in the right order from what I understand, the general way an scp is done is:

scp sourceuser@sourcehost:/path/to/source/file destinationuser@destinationhost:/path/to/destination/

Judging by your question, you have a local file you want to send to the destination server. So you have the right syntax which is good!

If you're getting permission denied, then you're not using the correct username or something's amiss with the authentication. Most likely, it's because the sudo command only works locally, for starters, so it won't give you root on the remote box, so that's probably the problem. Make sure that the user you are logging in as on the remote server has write permissions to the location you're trying to write to.

If the problem is the destinationuser doesn't have access to that location without sudo, move the file to the destinationuser's home folder then sudo mv the file from the shell on the other server to put it in the right location.

Answer 2

Hi had this same permission error problem solved it this way

Make sure the directory you are copying to on 192.168.0.4 is owned by the user username

chown username downloads

On your local machine then do

sudo scp filename.zip username@192.168.0.4:/etc/Myfiles/downloads

Cheers

Answer 3

Permisssion Denied means you are not the root of the server. You just hold an account there. So in that case you need to do this:

sudo scp -r /path2yourFolder/ username@server_Ip:/home/username

This will copy to your home directory on server.

This will also work:

scp -r /path2yourFolder/ username@server_Ip:~/

Answer 4

I had a similar problem, it happened because ssh takes -p xxxx for specifying the port while scp takes -P xxxx to specify the port. Minor inconsistency, so easy to miss :(

Answer 5

This error occurred for me when the file already existed in the target location and the existing file had read-only permissions (preventing the file from being overwritten). In my case, I just logged in and deleted the existing file and that corrected the problem.

Answer 6

Had the same problem. I found out that the directory containing my source file did not have enough permission. So I just changed the mode recursively using:chmod -R 771 directory_path on the source machine.

Answer 7

I was trying to copy from my local machine as username@localhost; the SSH key I was using wasn't registered to access my localhost, so I was getting permission denied. When I removed that from the source portion, it worked.

Answer 8

If there is an identically named file owned by root on the remote host (target) the transfer will fail. This assumes you are running scp as an ordinary user on both hosts, i.e. your remote host user is not root.