What is the difference between scp and sftp utilities

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 8 months ago. Active 3 months ago. Viewed k times. If it's not the same then what am I misunderstanding? Improve this question.

Michael Mrozek 84k 31 31 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Ivan Ivan This is an extension of a previous question. Ivan: it would have been helpful to mention this. See also superuser. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Just sounds a bit confusing to me Perhaps useful to say what is the same and what isn't.

What does this all mean from an end-user perspective? Community Bot 1. This was the best description of these 3 protocols for file manipulation I've seen! Thank you. But sftp and scp requires special programs on the server side, unlike FISH, which uses only basic Unix utuilities in the remote shell. According to the description of FISH,a remarkable feature of FISH is that it doesn't require something special on the remote side no server program, like scp for scp or sftp-server.

A computer network is a collection of network devices connected together to exchange data and resource. A protocol is a set of rules that allows devices to communicate. Generally, a network is configured for various protocols.

Both of them run on SSH. Therefore, both these protocols provide security features. Furthermore, both of them do not have any file size limitation. Basically, it writes bytes of files onto the SSH tunnel and allows the SSH to deal with the more complex process such as integrity and compression.

SCP can be used with wildcard statements as well when transferring multiple files based on your selected criteria. These wildcards can also be used to send and receive files. It also copies files between computers local and remote or between one remote host and another. It uses several features, such as compression or public key authentication, to connect and log into the specific host and enters the interactive command mode. It runs on TCP port It is also used to automatically retrieve files if you use a non-interactive authentication method; otherwise it retrieves them after successful interactive authentication.

A few similarities exist between both file transfer programs, like both use TCP port 22 and run on SSH making them equal in terms of security. They both offer features including encryption for data-in-motion, and public key authentication. SCP transfers data with protection from interception, while SFTP performs file access, transfer, and management functions.

So while SCP is better-designed for one-time file transfers between two networked computers, or remotely over the Internet, SFTP does this plus manages that data.