The following Globus Command Line Interface (CLI) commands perform and manage transfer functions on the files and folders at Globus endpoints. Visit the linked Globus pages for more details on each of these commands. Note that all sample commands are presented as they would be entered in a CLI interpreter.

The globus transfer command can take two forms: single target and batch.

Single Transfers

To transfer a single file or folder, use the form that takes two endpoint/ path parameters and copies the contents of the location specified by the first parameter to the location specified by the second. The "to" file name need not match the name of the "from" file.

Note that for single file/folder transfers the destination path is required. When transferring a folder and all of its contents, use the --recursive option.

In these examples, the transfers are made to the user's home folder at the second Globus Tutorial endpoint, which is initially empty. See the previous page to see how to set the gte1 and gte2 environment variables. The transfer tasks, which are performed asynchronously, quickly return a unique Globus task ID and then run in the background. A task ID can be used to inquire about the transfer status or to cancel the operation. The last globus ls command below was issued after waiting for the transfers to be completed.

Batch Transfers

To perform a "batch" transfer of multiple targets, use the --batch option and specify only the source and target endpoints in the command.

Then, individual source files/folders are identified on separate lines of either the stdin stream until an end-of-file (EOF) is entered or a text file. Each line is of the form:

The --recursive option must be provided when the source path is a folder. Blank lines and lines beginning with a '#' (comments) are ignored. The --batch option takes an argument which is either a file name or - if the list of objects to transfer is provided on the stdin stream. Assume you have a file list.txt with the following contents:

The following command uses that file to perform a transfer from the Globus Tutorial Endpoint 2 to the home directory on Endpoint 1 (which was empty at the start):