scp: how to find out that copying was finished

Off the top of my head, you could do something like:

touch tinyfilescp bigfile tinyfile user@host:

Then when tinyfile appears you know that the transfer of bigfile is complete.

As pointed out in the comments, this assumes that scp will copy the files one by one, in the order specified. If you don't trust it, you could do them one by one explicitly:

scp bigfile user@host:scp tinyfile user@host:

The disadvantage of this approach is that you would potentially have to authenticate twice. If this were an issue you could use something like ssh-agent.

On sending side (host1) use script like this:

#!/bin/bashecho 'starting transfer'scp FILE USER@DST_SERVER:DST_PATHOUT=$?if [ $OUT = 0 ]; then  echo 'transfer successful'  touch successful  scp successful USER@DST_SERVER:DST_PATHelse  echo 'transfer faild'fi

On receiving side (host2) make script like this:

#!/bin/bash SLEEP_TIME=30MAX_CNT=10CNT=0while [[ ! -e successful && $CNT < $MAX_CNT ]]; do    ((CNT++))    sleep($SLEEP_TIME);done; if [[ -e successful ]]; then    echo 'successful'    rm successful    # do somethning with FILEfi

With CNT and MAX_CNT you disable endless loop (in case file successful isn't transferred).Product MAX_CNT and SLEEP_TIME should be equal or greater expected transfer time. In my example expected transfer time is less than 300 seconds.

A checksum (md5sum, sha256sum ,sha512sum) of the local and remote files would tell you if they're identical.

For the situation where you don't have SSH access to the remote system - like an FTP server - you can download the file after it's uploaded and compare the checksums. I do this for files I send from production scripts at work. Below is a snippet from the script in which I do this.

MD5SRC=$(md5sum $LOCALFILE | cut -c 1-32)MD5TESTFILE=$(mktemp -p /ramdisk)curl \    -o $MD5TESTFILE \    -sS \    -u $FTPUSER:$FTPPASS \    ftp://$FTPHOST/$REMOTEFILEMD5DST=$(md5sum $MD5TESTFILE | cut -c 1-32)if [ "$MD5SRC" == "$MD5DST" ]then    echo "+Local and Remote files match!"else     echo "-Local and Remote files don't match"fi