I run Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit as my local Desktop OS. I’ve run the “SCP” command multiple times to multiple machines from my own PC when I’m moving files around, but for some reason when I tried to SCP, I got the following error:

dream@dream-C32A-H9:~/Downloads$ scp myfile.zip root@myserver.viviotech.net:/root
root@myserver.viviotech.net's password: 
bash: scp: command not found
lost connection

Okay… so that doesn’t make any sense. I use SCP all the time. What is *really* going on here? To find out, I ran SCP in verbose mode, whcih you can do by adding the “-v” switch to your SCP command:

:::snip:::
debug1: Authentication succeeded (password).
Authenticated to myserver.viviotech.net ([255.255.255.255]:22).
debug1: channel 0: new [client-session]
debug1: Requesting no-more-sessions@openssh.com
debug1: Entering interactive session.
debug1: Sending environment.
debug1: Sending env LANG = en_US.UTF-8
debug1: Sending command: scp -v -t -- /root
bash: scp: command not found
debug1: client_input_channel_req: channel 0 rtype exit-status reply 0
debug1: client_input_channel_req: channel 0 rtype eow@openssh.com reply 0
debug1: channel 0: free: client-session, nchannels 1
debug1: fd 0 clearing O_NONBLOCK
debug1: fd 1 clearing O_NONBLOCK
Transferred: sent 2048, received 2104 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
Bytes per second: sent 60339.9, received 61989.9
debug1: Exit status 127
lost connection

Ah… see these two lines:

debug1: Sending command: scp -v -t -- /root
bash: scp: command not found

So, we see that it was the REMOTE server that’s complaining about the “command not found”. Well, that should be easy enough to fix. I SSH’d over to the remote server and I was going to install SCP on it but I couldn’t remember what package SCP was in, so I looked for it using YUM (since the remote machine was a CentOS machine):

[root@myserver ~]# yum provides */scp
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * base: centos.mirror.facebook.net
 * extras: ftp.osuosl.org
 * updates: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu
r1soft/filelists                                         |  14 kB     00:00     
updates/filelists_db                                     | 2.9 MB     00:01     
openssh-clients-5.3p1-81.el6.x86_64 : An open source SSH client applications
Repo        : base
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/bin/scp

There we go. So the SCP command is provided by openssh-clients. I installed that by running the following:

yum -y install openssh-clients

Then I ran my SCP command again, and my file was uploaded without a hitch!

Hope this helps anyone else experiencing the same issues.