How to best capture and log scp output?

Question

I am trying to capture output from an install script (that uses scp) and log it. However, I am not getting everything that scp is printing out, namely, the progress bar. <

Answer 1

scp myfile user@host.com:. && echo success! 

is very helpful but to write the message to a log file I changed it like this

scp myfile user@host.com:. && echo myfile successfully copied! >> logfile 2>&1

and this will write "myfile successfully copied!" message to the log file.

Answer 2

Try:

scp server:/file /tmp/ > /dev/tty

Answer 3

scp prints its progress bar to the terminal using control codes. It will detect if you redirect output and thus omit the progress bar.

You can get around that by tricking scp into thinking it runs in a terminal using the "script" command which is installed on most distros by default:

script -q -c "scp server:/file /tmp/" > /tmp/test.txt

The content of test.txt will be:

file    0%    0     0.0KB/s   --:-- ETA
file   18%   11MB  11.2MB/s   00:04 ETA
file   36%   22MB  11.2MB/s   00:03 ETA
file   54%   34MB  11.2MB/s   00:02 ETA
file   73%   45MB  11.2MB/s   00:01 ETA
file   91%   56MB  11.2MB/s   00:00 ETA
file  100%   61MB  10.2MB/s   00:06

...which is probably what you want.

I stumbled over this problem while redirecting the output of an interactive script into a log file. Not having the results in the log wasn't a problem as you can always evaluate exit codes. But I really wanted the interactive user to see the progress bar. This answer solves both problems.