Can't scp :( help

Have you ascertained whether or not scp is actually working on the Mac Pro? If you log in there and just type scp do you at least get some usage text?

could be something wrong with your PATH, maybe?
try using the full path

/usr/bin/scp

I think deh2k is probably right. It sounds like as far as sshd is concerned, it can't find scp. You might want to check out the /etc/sshd_config file, at the top is a PATH string telling you what paths the daemon knows. Does that by chance not list the path that scp is installed at?

I would also run the simple test that deh2k mentioned. Does the shell/system find scp when you use an relative path invocation?

Yes, he writes that it does not work when using the scp command remotely.

I interpret this as doing something like

ssh user@remotebox 'scp somestuff tosomewhere:else'

I think default behaviour for remote command execution is in fact to reset the environment
to something restricted. This can further be restricted if a key is used for authorization.

specifying the full path should do the trick.

I'm unsure how to specify where to find scp on the remote host. Does it use a specific location, or the user's path? I suspect that it has nothing to do with the user's profile, so it would look in a specific place or places for it. If that's the case then why doesn't it run? Is there something wrong with it or can't it be found for some reason?

That's my thinking process anyway.

this was just an idea to try. I've just never seen scp failing because bash didn't recognize it and i thought that maybe something is wrong with the system PATH variable on the remote host where the command is being executed. I'm not exactly sure how the OP is using it as he was somewhat unclear about it.

If you move /usr/bin/scp to something like /usr/bin/scp.O on the remote host, then try a typical scp copy from the source machine:

user% scp myfile remote user@remotehost:/some/directory

then you will see the exact error that the original poster sees. I think it's sshd on the remote machine that knows about PATH, and that is what ultimately allows it to "find" scp.

So it may be that either scp really isn't in /usr/bin/, or sshd on the remote machine doesn't have the correct PATH specified.

have you tried it using the full path for scp? that's the only suggestion we came up with here.

*/usr/bin/scp test user@mac-pro-ip-address:.*

Thanks for the update, and I'm glad you got it working. I didn't know that sshd used your path to locate scp for the server side.