Bash script: Looping through directories over SSH and downloading them to local machine

I’m trying to write a bash script that:

• Loops through all the directories in a folder over an SSH server
• Downloads a file (titled say, “foo”) inside each of these folders to a local machine.

At the moment, I have:

ssh username@server "for dir in ~/directoryname/*; (... something here!); done"

I don’t think I can use scp while I’m accessing the SSH server, however. Is there a way I can loop through and download everything here?

Answer

running scp remotely would work only if the remote server has access to your own system. let’s assume it doesn’t.

you could do it in two steps:

ssh username@server "... some script that just echos the paths ..." > log
for line in $(<log); do scp username@server:$line ./dir/$line; done

or you could investigate rsync which is extremely powerful. it has --include and --exclude options which would allow you to do something like:

rsync -av username@server:~/somepath/ ./somepath/ [--exclude/--include flags]