Quick Tip - copying colons over ssh and rsync

If you happen to want to copy a file in the current directory with a colon in the name: bash scp some-file:123.txt user@host:/path/to/some-place this will fail. Possibly after quite a timeout, with a completely unrelated error (unresolved domain name some-file maybe?)

This is because ssh uses colons to separate the user@host part from the filename part.

The fix when the source is on the local computer is to ensure the path starts with a dot: bash scp ./some-file:123.txt user@host:/path/to/some-place

Incidentally this is related to that old newby fail, forgetting the trailing colon when coping to a destination home directory: bash scp some-file.txt user@host results in a file in the current directory called ‘user@host’. Oops!