File Transfer with scp

Using the SCP command

For MacOS, Linux, Windows 10 and Windows 11 users, file transferring between your personal computer and the HCC supercomputers can be achieved through the command scp which stands for secure copy. This method is ideal for quick transfer of smaller files. For large volume transfers, we recommend the using [Globus] or an SCP client such as WinSCP for Windows or CyberDuck for Mac/Linux.

Just like the cp copy command, the scp command requires two arguments, the path to source file(s) and the path to the target location. Since one or more of these locations are remote, you will need to specify the username and host for those.

$ scp <username>@<host>:<path_to_files> <username>@<host>:<path_to_files>

For the local location, you do not need to specify the username or host. When transferring to and from your local computer, the scp command should be ran on your computer, NOT from HCC clusters.

Uploading a file to Crane

Here is an example of file transfer to and from the Crane cluster.

To upload the file data.csv in your current directory to your $WORK directory on the Crane cluster, you would use the command:

$ scp ./data.csv <user_name>@crane.unl.edu:/work/<group_name>/<user_name>

where <user_name> and <group_name> are replaced with your user name and your group name.

Downloading a file from Crane

To download the file data.csv from your $WORK directory on the Crane cluster to your current directory, you would use the command:

$ scp <user_name>@crane.unl.edu:/work/<group_name>/<user_name>/data.csv ./