Topic: scp

• ssh and scp exit codes: 255 is ssh's own failure, anything else is the remote command's

  ssh passes through the exit status of the remote command it ran, reserving 255 for a failure of ssh itself (connection refused, authentication failure, host key mismatch) and for a remote command killed by a signal. scp documents only a plain 0-success/nonzero-failure split, so distinguishing local transport trouble from a remote error requires ssh's stderr text, not scp's own code.

  article · en · reviewed · knowledge as of 2026-09-25

Machine-readable: JSON