Is there a way to do a remote "ls" much like "scp" does a remote copy?

Solution 1:

You could always do this:

ssh user@host ls -l /some/directory

That will SSH to the host, run ls, dump the output back to you and immediately disconnect.

Solution 2:

To list all files in a directory:

rsync host.name.com:directory/path/'*'

For something like find directory/path -ls

rsync -r host.name.com:directory/path

Solution 3:

For all coming via google to this question because they are looking for a way to list remote files but can not access the remote server via ssh (common case for backup servers) you could use 'sftp'.

Example:

sftp [email protected]
ls
cd somedir
exit

Start an interactive session in a specific remote directory:

sftp [user@]host[:dir]

Solution 4:

Yes. SSH and do an ls:

ssh host ls /path

You could easily script this to be more flexible, or use the host:path syntax scp uses.

Solution 5:

The above answers do not contemplate when you need to add a password. To include password and username in a single command, install sshpass.

For mac: $ brew install hudochenkov/sshpass/sshpass

For linux: sudo apt-get install sshpass -y

Then:

$ sshpass -p your_password ssh user@hostname ls /path/to/dir/

You can also save output:

$ sshpass -p your_password ssh user@hostname ls /path/to/dir/ > log.txt

In python3:

import subprocess

cluster_login_email = 'user@hostname'
cluster_login_password = 'your_password'
path_to_files = '/path/to/dir/'

response = subprocess.run([
        'sshpass', '-p', cluster_login_password, 'ssh', cluster_login_email, 'ls',
        path_to_files], capture_output=True)

response = response.stdout.decode("utf-8").split('\n')

Tags:

Linux

Shell

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