13 comment

1. Two other methods that have worked well for me in the past regarding this issue...
   
   1) "Escape" the special character(s) using your shell's preferred escape character.  As far as I know, most shells accept a backslash as an escape character.
   
   Example:
   scp file\:name.txt user@server1:/path
   
   2) Enclose the "offending" path in double quotes.  This is especially useful for filenames which contain many spaces and other special characters.
   
   Example:
   scp "file:name.txt" user@server1:/path

   1. scp / rsync command will not work with ‘Escape’ and “double quote” syntax as as those command treat : as host specifiers. As soon as scp see : it assumes a network based host.

      1. Scp and rsync do work with ‘Escape’ and “double quote” syntax. I tested on Fedora 14.

         1. Dear guru, please provide us your command line for escaping : in a filename then.

            Yes, scp “file” host:/path works fine. scp file:withcolon host:/path however does not and neither does file\:withcolor host:/path. So whilst the command can *use* escaping/quoting it doesn’t change the handling of the colon. Perhaps if you escaped it with a ton of blackslashes it will – but seriously – who wants to do that?

            1. It worked for Me when I gave the full path

2. Careful if using double quotes, as certain special characters inside the quoted text will still be interpreted by the shell, like ‘$’ and ‘!’ among others. If using quotes, single quotes is better unless you already have single quotes in the text to quote.

   If you’re using bash or csh or any other recent shell that has filename auto-completion, you can probably press TAB key (or maybe ESC, but in ubuntu and most others recently they use bash which defaults to TAB key). This will complete the filename for you (or as much as it can if there are multiple similar filenames in the same directory) and use quotes or slashes to escape the characters as necessary.

3. As long as you have the : on the local system you can either use backslash to quote it or single quotes.
   Where I havn’t found a solution yet, is when the remote target path (not filename) contains a colon.

   rsync /path/file.txt user@host:/remotes/x:y/file.txt
   

   1. please delete my comment … problem found between keyboad and chair ;-)

4. or just \:

5. Hi

   My problem is that I recursively backup a directory structure (iPhoto library) from macos to Linux. During the processing it encounters subfolders with colons on the remote host and fails. Is there any way around this?

6. quoting or escaping the colon won’t work because the shell still passes a plain colon to scp. something like this does work:
   scp ./as:df localhost:qw:er
   that copies a file called ‘as:df’ in your current directory to a file called ‘qw:er’ in your home directory. of course, you can use any host name.

7. I’m also trying to rsync recursively an entire linux home directory to a backup drive connected to my router. The backup drive is mounted using mount.cifs, and is an NTFS filesystem. The errors I get are of the form

   rsync: mkstemp “/media/backup/E6520_Backup/simon/localsvnLogs/.Log_Fri_Dec_21_19:30:59_CST_2012.W95vF6” failed: Not a directory (20)

   Since I regularly identify files by date, thousands of them have colons in them.

   Is there any way around this, eg.., maybe by formating the backup drive with a different filesystem?

8. Why this is categories under OpenBSD?

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