Mac OS does something weird with some font files. Basically it stores the data in two separate places which means that copying using scp or rsync tends to fail. This use of resource forks makes it incredibly difficult to copy these files without using the Finder.

RsyncX HFS is one option, its a version of rsync that supports resource forks.

Another option though is to use the command line utility ditto. This comes with OS X and essentially allows you to compress all of the files into a single copyable file. You can use it like this, but you could rtfm.

Create an archive:

ditto -c --rsrc SourceDirContainingFonts AnyOldFileName


You could then zip that (although ditto may support compression… rtfm), scp it to another location. To unarchive simply:

ditto -x --rsrc AnyOldFileName DestinationDir


You can do the archie-copy-unarchive in one go too:

ditto -c --rsrc SourceDirContainingFonts - | ssh user@host 'ditto -x --rsrc - DestinationDir'


Obviously, you can use this for anything, not just fonts. But its fonts that caused me the grief!