Rcp

The rcp (remote copy) command is part of the Berkely RPC (Remote Procedure Call) package. (See rsh and rdist for other examples.) It lets you copy a file from one machine to another, almost as easily as copying a file between two directories.

Caveat

Please learn to use scp instead of rcp. scp was written with security in mind, which was never part of rcp's design.

Copying to/from remote machines

The basic form of the rcp command is very simple. Say we have a file called "books" that we've edited on our local machine, and we need to give Greta a copy. The sysadmin values utility over everything else, so Greta's machine is called "greta". We're going to assume we're on a small LAN, so we don't need to worry about a domain name. To copy the file from our home directory on the local machine, to our home directory on Greta's machine, we'd type:

rcp books greta:

Let's say we don't have an account on Greta's machine. We could write it to /tmp:

rcp books greta:/tmp

Now let's go the other way. Greta has been doing some work on the file called "tapes" and we want a copy of that for ourselves:

rcp greta:/home/greta/tapes .

(The "." means "the current directory).

Finally, just to show what the whole thing looks like, we'll assume we're in our home directory, but we want to copy something to a different directory.

rcp greta:/usr/acctng/gl/inventory/tapes /usr/acctng/gl/inventory

If you don't put a "/" in front of the file name (but after the colon), it will assume you're in your home directory. If we had run:

rcp greta:usr/acctng/gl/inventory/tapes /usr/acctng/gl/inventory

it would have tried to go to our home directory, and then the usr/acctng/gl/inventory directory under that. If what you want IS somewhere in your home directory, that's fine. If it's not, be sure to remember to put the "/" right after the colon.