Yrurtj

I'm having some trouble uploading directories(which contain other directories a few levels deep) by sftp. I realize I could work around this by gzipping, but I don't see why that's necessary.

Anyway, I try

sftp> put bin/

Uploading bin/ to /home/earlz/blah/bin

bin/ is not a regular file

sftp> put -r bin/

Uploading bin/ to /home/earlz/blah/bin

Couldn't canonicalise: No such file or directory

Unable to canonicalise path "/home/earlz/blah/bin"

I think the last error message is completely stupid. So the directory doesn't exist? Why not create the directory?

Is there anyway around this issue with sftp, or should I just use scp?

CORRECTED: I initially claimed wrongly that OpenSSH did not support put -r. It does, but it does it in a very strange way. It seems to expect the destination directory to already exist, with the same name as the source directory.

sftp> put -r source

 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/source

 Couldn't canonicalize: No such file or directory

 etc.

sftp> mkdir source

sftp> put -r source

 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/source

 Entering source/

 source/file1

 source/file2

What's especially strange is that this even applies if you give a different name for the destination:

sftp> put -r source dest

 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/dest

 Couldn't canonicalize: ...

sftp> mkdir dest

sftp> put -r source dest

 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/dest/source

 Couldn't canonicalize: ...

sftp> mkdir dest/source

sftp> put -r source dest

 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/dest/source

 Entering source/

 source/file1

 source/file2

For a better-implemented recursive put, you could use the PuTTY psftp command line tool instead. It's in the putty-tools package under Debian (and most likely Ubuntu).

Alternately, Filezilla will do what you want, if you want to use a GUI.

I don't know why sftp does this but you can only recursive copy if the destination directory already exists. So do this...

sftp> mkdir bin

sftp> put -r bin

You might be interested in using rsync instead. The command for that would be

 rsync --delete --rsh=ssh -av bin/ remote-ip-or-fqdn:/home/earlz/blah/bin/

This will copy everything in bin/ and place it in on the remote server in /home/earlz/blah/bin/. As an added benefit, it will first check to see if the file on the remote side hasn't changed, and if it hasn't, it won't re-send it. Additionally, you can add a -z option and it will compress it for you.

May I suggest a somewhat complicated answer, without zipping, but including tar?

Here we go:

tar -cf - ./bin | ssh target.org " ( cd /home/earlz/blah ; tar -xf - ) "

This will pack the directory ./bin with tar (-cf:=create file), filename - (none, stdout) and pipe it through the ssh-command to target.org (which might as well be an IP) where the command in quotes is performed, which is:
cd to blah, and tar -xf (extract file) - none, no name, just stdin.

It's as if you pack a package at home, bring it to the post, then drive to work, where you expect the package and open it.

Maybe there is a much more elegant solution which just uses sftp.

lcd: your local folder (with subfolders)

cd: your remote folder

put -r .