Well one nice thing about Windows 10 is that it has a built in ssh/scp client! Although telnet is optional, I get that it’s insecure but jeez what is a retro user to do?

Anyways the subject at hand is copying files from somewhere that has spaces in the path. In this case I need a copy of OS X Snow Leopard from my Mac Pro cylinder to this junk Fujitsu Celsius. I’m still having USB issues, but I’d like to get my data off of an external disk formatted in HFS+. And for ‘reasons’ I wanted to use something “native” but I don’t feel like building a Hackintosh. While not a strict tutorial on getting Snow Leopard running, I did upload my old download of Empire EFI on archive.org as this kind of stuff is damned near impossible to find.

So back to the matter at hand, I have this VM setup on my Mac Pro, and I want it on this Windows machine. You’d think it would be something like this:

scp -C [email protected]:"/Users/neozeed/Virtual Machines.localized/OSX 10.6/*" .
Password:
scp: /Users/neozeed/Virtual: No such file or directory
scp: Machines.localized/OSX: No such file or directory
scp: 10.6/*: No such file or directory

Okay so double quotes didn’t work. How about a Unix style escape for spaces? I mean it *is* scp after all, maybe it doesn’t know it’s on Windows.

C:\osx>scp -C [email protected]:"/Users/neozeed/Virtual\ Machines.localized/OSX\ 10.6/*" .
Password:
scp: /Users/neozeed/Virtual: No such file or directory
scp: Machines.localized/OSX: No such file or directory
scp: 10.6/*: No such file or directory

Well maybe it parses it like C, so you need double backslash? NO that doesn’t work either. Talk about frustrating. So, in an act of insanity, I tried single quoting the interior spaces around double quotes, something idiotic like a bash variable:

C:\osx>scp -C [email protected]:"/Users/neozeed/Virtual' 'Machines.localized/OSX' '10.6/*" .
Password:
Mac OS Snow Leopard.vmdk                                                               69%   11GB  16.0MB/s   05:16 ETA

And yes, now it’s transferring. I’m just using a cheap 50zt 5 port 100Mbit dumb switch. It’s good enough and it’ll probably take some 30 minutes to transfer all the bits, but it’s working.

So there you go. You may not need it now, or tomorrow but it’ll save you the 20 minutes of frustration!