An "examples" section would make a good addition to the scp man page. If this were sent to the package author in the form of a patch to the current man page sources, I'll bet he would be willing to add it. - Jim Van Zandt This command scp gw:/etc/passwd /tmp will copy the passwd file from my computer to the /tmp directory on my computer. You can, of course, copy from your computer to a remote one: scp my-delights gw:/tmp You can also use wildcards in the usually Linux manner: scp gw:/var/ftp/pub/* /tmp If ssh is configured to work without password prompts, then scp will too.