How to save files from remote server

Question

I am not sure if this question belongs here, so feel free to migrate.

I have some files on a mail server(I am not sure how this works, but I can access these from the Linux terminal by ssh-ing the mail server and logging in with the email id and password).

This is what I enter on a terminal

~$ ssh <enter email id here>
 <email id>'s password:*******

Which gives me this.

Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.8.0-44-generic x86_64)

* Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

System information as of Thu Aug  7 15:22:21 IST 2014

System load:  0.55                Processes:           178
Usage of /:   20.4% of 223.17GB   Users logged in:     3
Memory usage: 46%                 IP address for eth0: 14.139.157.212
Swap usage:   0%

Graph this data and manage this system at https://landscape.canonical.com/

You have mail.
Last login: Wed Aug  6 17:05:46 2014 from is.isibang.ac.in
bmat1420@ms:~$ ls
cipher    examples.desktop  mail       roots    rot8    stars    try.txt
cipher.c  junk              oldrot8.c  roots.c  rot8.c  stars.c

How do I save these files to the desktop?

Answer 1

You can use the scp command

In your case, if you want to copy the 'mail' folder, you would use a command like this

scp -r user@host:mail ~/Desktop

to get the cipher.c file only you can use

scp user@host:cipher.c ~/Desktop