Suppose I'm on machine DESKTOP and I want to copy files from server APPLE to server BANANA. DESKTOP has access to both, but firewalls and/or missing ssh keys prevent direct access between APPLE and BANANA.

Regular scp(1) will now fail. It will attempt to do a direct copy and then give up. This is where this indirect scp wrapper (view) comes in:

• First, it tries to do the direct copy.
• If that fails, it uses the local machine as an intermediary.

In this example you'll see it fail twice for the two source files and then ...