How can I check if scp is available?

Question

For my system I have to know whether I can do SCP (with or without transfering a file) with a particular number of systems in the network repeatedly.

We may not transfer files but we have to know how we can do SCP without giving a password.

Answer 1

You may find Net::SCP Perl module helpful.

Answer 2

You could try to see if the remote host responds on port 22. There are various tools that try to open a port. For example, try

curl :22

this will print something different depending on whether the port responds or not. I'm sure there are better tools (nmap, for example) that could do the job, but that's the first that came to mind.

This won't of course test whether SCP will actually work. could be that ssh but not scp is enabled. But it will get you closer.