How to download a file from aws server using SSH?

Question

Environment: Remote: AWS - RHEL 7.2 Local: Ubuntu 16.04

I SSH into the AWS box directly using a .pem file for authentication, something along the lines of:

ssh -i /home/<user>/<path>/<serverkey>.pem ec2-user@ec2-<awsserver>.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

What I want to do is simply download a file not owned by the root user, but by another user so the usual scp magic does not readily work.

Any suggestions?

Solution 1

Personally, I would look in to why sftp or scp is not working.

Technically you can do:

ssh -t user@host 'cat /path/to/file' > out.file

This may NOT produce an identical file, but might be good enough for what you want.

For example, my test case transfer produced a file with CRLF (dos) line terminators and the original had LF (unix) - I'm not sure why to be honest. The rest of the file was identical. No binary file was tested either.

The test was performed from Linux to FreeBSD.

Solution 2

 ssh — OpenSSH SSH client (remote login program)
 scp — secure copy (remote file copy program)
 sftp — secure file transfer program

use scp, or sftp. example usage;

scp [email protected]:/home/ec2-user/.bashrc download-bashrc.txt

all three work with the ssh daemon.

ps, to attain the file of another user make sure your user has read access to the file (either chmod/chown, or copy the file to your user's home).

Comments

[Jakuje]

log in to the server as that user? Copy the file as root to ec2-user accessible location and use scp?

[phk]

Please elaborate how the file will differ. I'm genuinely interested.

[Tigger]

@phk I added some details to the answer.

[Lefty G Balogh]

Your solution worked out as follows: ssh -i /home/<path>/<morepath>/key.pem -t ec2-user@ec2-<server>.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com 'cat /home/ec2-user/file.xml' > /home/<user>/Desktop/out.file Worked like a charm. Definitely worth an upvote.

[Lefty G Balogh]

Your solution also worked out real smooth. I shortcut the user rights and copied the file so ec2 could access it and then: scp -i /home/<path>/<morepath>/key.pem ec2-user@ec2-<server>.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:/home/‌​ec2-user/file.xml /home/<user>/Desktop Also worth an upvote. Thank you.