Using scp on some flavours of Unix can be tricky some times. For example, on AIX you meight have an error when trying to scp some files from a local directory to a remote directory on a remote server.

$ scp -r * 192.168.2.1:~/ ksh: scp:  not found. lost connection

Then I noticed a difference:

On the local server:

local$ which scp /usr/bin/scp

And on the remote server:

remote$ which scp /usr/local/bin/scp

 when invoked on the remote AIX server , scp loads the environment variable PATH from /etc/environment file. In this case on the remote AIX server there was:

remote$ grep PATH /etc/environment PATH=/usr/bin:/etc:/usr/sbin:/usr/ucb:/usr/bin/X11:/sbin LOCPATH=/usr/lib/nls/loc NLSPATH=/usr/lib/nls/msg/%L/%N:/usr/lib/nls/msg/%L/%N.cat

it's clear that, after connecting to remote AIX server, scp couldn't envoke scp there because it wasn't in the path.

Solution: edit /etc/environment file on the remote server and alter the line where PATH variable is defined as below:

remote$ grep PATH /etc/environment PATH=/usr/bin:/etc:/usr/sbin:/usr/ucb:/usr/bin/X11:/sbin:/usr/local/bin LOCPATH=/usr/lib/nls/loc NLSPATH=/usr/lib/nls/msg/%L/%N:/usr/lib/nls/msg/%L/%N.cat

Notice that I added the path /usr/local/bin to PATH line in /etc/environment.

This method is applicable on AIX. Depending on your Linux/Unix OS you should edit other files. 

Bookmarks:

Echo "How to fix "ksh: scp: not found. lost connection" error on AIX" around:

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