UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am looking for a way to transfer entire folders from a Unix server to my mac OS X system. I am trying to use scp with the command % scp -r (user@host):dir . and it diesn't seem to work. I get the error "protocol error: mtime.sec not delimited" Thanks for any help.

It looks (by your prompt) that you're using the csh, or a variant thereof. I'm not very familiar with scp, but a quick google gave me two results - one of them follows:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-...0/02/0016.html
The other was similar, but posed as a question and provided no answer.

Hope this helps a little...

I have already found this myself but it doesn't help very much. Are there any other options for transferring entie dir's?

What about tar / ftp ?

Code:

tar zcf ./mydir.tgz /path/to/mydir
ftp my_box
     user passwd
     put mydir.tgz
     bye
telnet my_box
     user passwd
     tar zxf mydir.tgz
     exit

It's a little more work, but you also have even more control over each step... Good in a pinch, and reliable if both services are running... If you still want to be secure, see if you can get sftp and ssh up and running - they should come with the shh distribution.

This looks interesting but could you give me a little better description of how I can impliment this? As you can see I am new to unix, but thank you for your time!

Basically, you use tar (used originally to create Tape ARchives) to bundle one or more files or entire directories into a single file. Then you can ftp them to the remote machine. After that, you can log in (using telnet or ssh) to the remote machine, and unpack the file wherever you want it.
For more exact info for your system, check out the man pages for ftp, telnet, and tar.

(A useful command, just in case:
man man)

I'll give it a try thank you!