Bob Goodwin - Zuni, Virginia, USA writes:
Is there something wrong with this command?
[root@box9 simple]# scp -r bobg@box8:/home/bobg/
/run/media/bobg/Simple/Box8BkU
I would like to copy the contents [roughly 44G per du -h] of
/home/bobg/ on box8 to an external USB 500G hard drive. The problem
is that it appears to be trying to keep recopying the files until
the 500 gigs is reached. I let it run until the end yesterday and it
quit protesting it had run out of space.
You will find your answer in the scp man page:
-r Recursively copy entire directories. Note that scp follows sym‐
============
bolic links encountered in the tree traversal.
==============================================
Somewhere in your home directory you have a symlink pointing to a parent
directory. This will result in scp -r going into an infinite loop, as it
keeps finding and recurse into the same symlink.
Eventually, if the target is big enough, scp -r will probably fail, when the
constructed pathname finally exceeds PATH_MAX :-)