Why am I getting “error stdin: is not a tty, /my/local/directory: no such file or directory”?

I can't figure out why it can't find my directory. I am using the SSH terminal in cPanel to transfer a large directory to my remote server from the local machine I'm on. I ran

scp -r C:/my/local/directory :/my/remote/directory

I've also tried without the -r with just a file and the same error occured. I am typing in the password to the server when it asks but it also asks for a passphrase I do not have access to. I just skip it and it asks me for the password. At the end it says connection to C closed, so I know it's recognizing that. Would it be easier to use FTP? I'm pretty new to linux.

Thanks in advance!

2 Answers

scp interprets : as a separator between host and path. On windows, you can't user absolute path with scp. Rather use relative paths:

cd C:/my/local
scp -r directory/ :/my/remote/directory

You may refer to your home directory / path using the attilde (~) symbol. So if my folder already resides within the home directory of the current user from which I'm trying to copy, I can do something like:

scp -r ~/dir123 :~/.

This would copy dir123 from current loged users home directory (typically in /home/user_id) onto the remote users home directory with the same name & similarly within the root of their home directory.