giulix63 wrote:There's a space before the final dot and no space after the colon.
Look, giulix63, thanks very much for your help, but I think gerald_clark has a point.
The Linux I.T. 'Gods' are definitely against me tonight.
It occurred to me that the reason I was having problems coping messages.txt and yum.log was that I'd created them when I was logged in as a root, and so the permissions were being restrictive. So I am unplugged my monitor from my Linux P.C. for the umpteenth time and re-connected it to the server, at which point I realised that the monitor wasn't powering on - I'd manage to blow the P.S.U. in the monitor up!!!
Fortunately, I have a second monitor so plugged that in, copied the files across to my home directory - pretty much where the location you'd used in your post, then chowned from root to me - and now I get:
[Nathan@8vydtklay usb]$ scp Nathan@server_ip_address:/home/messages .
ssh: connect to host server_ip_address port 22: Connection refused
I don't think CentOS and I get on very well, butl I tried - and so did you, so thanks very much.
I'm off to take up gardening instead...