Linux scp hidden file issue

The .. pattern in the {.,}* expansion represents the parent directory (one level above the current directory). This causes the error because scp tries to include the parent directory, which is not what you intend.

Solution:

To avoid including .., you can modify the pattern to match hidden files and directories without the .. directory. Here’s the corrected command:

scp -r fapuser@158.220.199.227:/home/fapuser/{.[!.],}* .

• {.[!.],}* ensures that . followed by any character except . is included, which prevents .. from being matched.
• This pattern will still match hidden files and directories like .bashrc and .config.

This should fix the issue with the unexpected .. directory error.

The reason hidden files aren’t transferred is because the * wildcard doesn’t match files that start with a dot (.) by default. To include those hidden files, you need to use the {.,}* pattern. Here’s how it works:

• * matches all non-hidden files (files that don’t start with a dot).
• {.,}* matches both hidden files (starting with a dot) and regular files. The {.,} part tells the shell to consider both an empty prefix ("") and a dot (".") as valid matches before the filename.

This way, hidden files like .bashrc will be included in the transfer.

In Bash (and most other shells), the * wildcard is expanded by the shell before the actual command (like scp) is executed.

Here’s what happens:

1. Wildcard Expansion: Bash interprets the * wildcard and expands it to match all the filenames in the specified directory that are not hidden (i.e., do not start with a dot .).
2. Command Execution: Once the shell expands the wildcard, it passes the resulting list of filenames to the command (in your case, scp).

For example:

scp -r fapuser@158.220.199.227:/home/fapuser/* .

If /home/fapuser/ contains files file1, file2, and .bashrc, Bash will expand * to file1 file2 and not .bashrc, so only file1 and file2 will be passed to scp.

This is why you need to use {.,}* if you want to match both hidden and non-hidden files; Bash will expand that pattern to include hidden files as well.

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