UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have extremely limited programming experience so please go slowly!

I am remotely logged in to a secure network cluster via my username at my school through terminal. I'm trying to download a file from my account on the cluster to my desktop on a guest account on my mac.

I tried doing this: help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH/TransferFiles

Code:

scp test guest@myIPaddress: Desktop/

where test is the name of the file i want to download, guest is my username on the computer I'm typing on (as opposed to my username on the server I'm remotely logged into), and myIPaddress is my ip address (the number string). (I had to put a space between the colon and Desktop because the forum was displaying it as a smilie face...it doesnt have a space in what i entered on terminal)

The IP I got by going to system preferences>network and the only options were AirPort (which doesn't have an ip address listed), Parallels Host-Guest, and Parallels NAT so I used the ip address for Parallels Host-Guest; then I tried going to AirPort then TCP/IP and using that IP address and I got the same error message

I get the following error message:

Code:

ssh: connect to host myIPaddress port 22: Connection timed out
lost connection

...help?

Moderator's Comments:

Please use CODE tags (not bold font) when displaying sample input, output, and code segments.

Typically you would do this in the form:

Code:

scp guest@myIPaddress:/path/to/test Desktop/

I'm not a Mac user, so I'm assuming Desktop/ is a valid path for the destination of the file.

it's always scp source destination but the user@remotemachineIP portion can be either in the source or the destination depending on whether you're copying to or from the machine you're issuing the command from.

Code:

scp user@remotemachineIP:/path/to/source/file /path/to/local/destination

or

Code:

scp /local/path/to/file user@remotemachineIP:/path/to/remote/destination/file