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Praweł
Asked: 2010-12-14 07:19:23 +0800 CST

How to send SFTP file download to background?

  • 772

Is it possible to:

  1. execute sftp command on remote machine and download a file (ssh user@machine, sftp user2@server, get file)
  2. then, send download to background, so I can turn my local computer off
command-line sftp

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try screen on machine B, start the download and detach afterwards:

    On machine A:

    ssh user@B

    On machine B:

    screen
sftp user@C
get some_file.tar.gz
Ctrl-a d
logout

    Never tried but could work.

    Edit: later, log back in and use screen -x to reconnect to the running session. Then, shut it down properly so that it isn't consuming the server's resources.

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  2. If you just want the "detach" feature of screen, there's a program called "dtach" that provides only that feature.

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  3. Putting the character & (ampersand) behind a command runs it in background. However, I don't know how to do it after a command has already been executed, nor do I know whether this works on remote machines.

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  4. There are a number of solutions to this issue.

    One option is to use the screen command, however seems a little complex.

    The best way I have found is sending the job to the background.

    In your case the command would be 

    scp user@machine:~/filename.ext /tmp &
scp -r user@machine:~/dirname /tmp &
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