I have two terminal windows with bash. One is local on the client computer, another one has an SSH-session on the server. On the server, I am in a directory and seeing a file I would like to copy to my client using scp from the client. On the server I see: user@server:/path$ ls filename filename I can now type scp in the client shell, select and copy the user@server:/path from the server shell and paste to the client shell, then type slash and copy and paste the filename and append a dot to get: user@client:~$ scp user@server:/path/filename . to scp a file from the server to the client. Now I am searching for a command on the server, that would work like this: user@server:/path$ special_ls filename user@server:/path/filename which would give me the complete scp-ready string to copy&paste to the client shell. Something in the form echo $USER@$HOSTNAME:${pwd}/$filename working with relative/absolute paths. Is there any such command/switch combination or do I have to hack it myself? Thank you very much.