Live Free. Live Happy.

I often find it difficult to use 'scp' program because I don't know the exact path to the directory in the destination server and I do not find 'sftp' program very useful because it does not support recursive downloads. Here are two programs which offer recursive downloads over sftp protocol:

1. psftp provided by package putty-tools

# psftp user@server
psftp> get -r directory_to_download
psftp> put -r directory_to_upload

2. lftp provided by package lftp. It seems that lftp is much more advanced than psftp but the commands might be slightly different from the ones we use in 'sftp' program.

# lftp sftp://user@server
lftp> mirror directory_to_download
lftp> mirror -R directory_to_upload

And if you are looking for a really good sftp GUI client, then I highly recommend 'Filezilla'.

The best part is that all these tools are available in the Debian Lenny repo.