Copy files with PowerShell Remoting

Recently at work, I found myself in the situation where I needed to copy some file from my workstation to a jump box. Now of course, on Linux I’d just use rsync or scp. But our IT doesn’t like provisioning Linux boxes and therefore uses Windows for jump servers too, so no luck here. Luckily, I could convince them to turn on and allow PowerShell Remoting, so with some simple scripts I can still easily copy files over without using SMB. Here’s how.

function Copy-LocalToRemote(
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)] $LocalPath,
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)] $RemotePath,
    $ComputerName = 'my.default.target.host'
) {
    Invoke-Command -ComputerName $ComputerName `
        {
            param($path, $content)
            Set-Content -Path $path -Value $content `
                -AsByteStream
        } `
        -ArgumentList $RemotePath,(Get-Content $LocalPath Raw -AsByteStream)
}

function Copy-RemoteToLocal(
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)] $RemotePath,
    [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)] $LocalPath,
    $ComputerName = 'my.default.source.host'
) {
    Invoke-Command -ComputerName $ComputerName `
        {
            param($path)
            Get-Content -Path $path -Raw -AsByteStream
        } `
        -ArgumentList $RemotePath |
    Set-Content -Path $LocalPath -AsByteStream
}

New-Alias -Name 'ltr' -Value 'Copy-LocalToRemote'
New-Alias -Name 'rtl' -Value 'Copy-RemoteToLocal'

As you can see, this is quite simple. Obviously, the functions above can only copy one file at a time. Maybe in the future I’ll build something that can copy entire file structures recursively. I also haven’t spent any time looking at how efficient it is to pass streams this way. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this would perform poorly for large files. But then again, I’m mostly pushing around scripts and config files, so this works just fine.

You can put this into your profile file and have it loaded with every PowerShell session - it’s what I do.