Back-slash escaping of spaces works when accessing local files: [genie@homeland ~]$ echo "hello" > spa\ ce [genie@homeland ~]$ ls -l spa\ ce -rw-rw-r-- 1 genie genie 6 Jul 3 14:58 spa ce [genie@homeland ~]$ scp /home/genie/spa\ ce bugzilla@armageddon.ethz.ch:/home/bugzilla spa ce 100% 6 0.0KB/s 00:00 The file is actually on the remote machine: [bugzilla@armageddon ~]$ ls -l spa\ ce -rw-rw-r-- 1 bugzilla bugzilla 6 Jul 3 14:58 spa ce If I now try to copy the file from the remote machine, I get the following error: [genie@homeland ~]$ rm spa\ ce [genie@homeland ~]$ scp bugzilla@armageddon.ethz.ch:/home/bugzilla/spa\ ce . scp: /home/bugzilla/spa: No such file or directory scp: ce: No such file or directory Hence, back-slash escaping of spaces after a "username@hostname:" tag seems to be ignored.
I'd say that this is a feature rather than a bug. The path is again shell expanded on the remote machine. This will work: scp "<host>:<path>/spa\\ ce" .
Sorry - we can't fix this: it is a 20+ year old limitation of rcp that scp has inherited and changing the behaviour of scp would break many people's working scripts.
Change all RESOLVED bug to CLOSED with the exception of the ones fixed post-4.4.