Paramiko / Scp - Check If File Exists On Remote Host

I'm using Python Paramiko and scp to perform some operations on remote machines. Some machines I work on require files to be available locally on their system. When this is the cas

Solution 1:

Use paramiko's SFTP client instead. This example program checks for existence before copy.

#!/usr/bin/env pythonimport paramiko
import getpass

# make a local test fileopen('deleteme.txt', 'w').write('you really should delete this]n')

ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
try:
    ssh.connect('localhost', username=getpass.getuser(),
        password=getpass.getpass('password: '))
    sftp = ssh.open_sftp()
    sftp.chdir("/tmp/")
    try:
        print(sftp.stat('/tmp/deleteme.txt'))
        print('file exists')
    except IOError:
        print('copying file')
        sftp.put('deleteme.txt', '/tmp/deleteme.txt')
    ssh.close()
except paramiko.SSHException:
    print("Connection Error")

Solution 2:

It should be possible to use only paramiko combined with 'test' command to check file existence. This doesn't require SFTP support:

from paramiko import SSHClient

ip = '127.0.0.1'
file_to_check = '/tmp/some_file.txt'

ssh = SSHClient()
ssh.load_system_host_keys()
ssh.connect(ip)

stdin, stdout, stderr = ssh.exec_command('test -e {0} && echo exists'.format(file_to_check))
errs = stderr.read()
if errs:
    raise Exception('Failed to check existence of {0}: {1}'.format(file_to_check, errs))

file_exits = stdout.read().strip() == 'exists'print file_exits