As part of the 8.0 pre-release announcement, the OpenSSH project stated that they consider the scp protocol outdated, inflexible, and not readily fixed. They then go on to recommend the use of sftp or rsync for file transfer instead. Many users grew up on the scp command, however, and so are not familiar with rsync. Additionally, rsync can do much more than just copy files, which can give a beginner the impression that it’s complicated and opaque. Especially when broadly the scp flags map directly to the cp flags while the rsync flags do not. This article will provide an introduction and transition guide for anyone familiar with scp. Let’s jump into the most common scenarios: Copying Files and Copying Directories. Copying files For copying a single file, the scp and rsync commands are effectively equivalent. Let’s say you need to ship foo.

Recently I decided to start using a password manager as I’ve found myself caring more and more about security lately. Like many others I had the bad habit of using the same few passwords across many sites and with the multitude of security breaches and password dumps we’ve seen this year (I’m pretty sure that you could find my old DropBox password in there if you looked hard enough.) has motivated me to correct that. So, I’ve taken it upon myself to “up my game” and practice what my good friend Jason Crosby preaches (turns out he isn’t just a crazy old sysadmin). A quick side note about this guide I assume in this guide that you’re running in a Linux, Mac, BSD, or some other Unix-like system running bash or a comparable shell. On Windows I have no idea how to set all this up, there is a Windows client for password-store that I can attest to working quite well but I already had my password store set up with a git repo etc.