Uploading directories with sftp?

I don't know why sftp does this but you can only recursive copy if the destination directory already exists. So do this...

sftp> mkdir bin
sftp> put -r bin

CORRECTED: I initially claimed wrongly that OpenSSH did not support put -r. It does, but it does it in a very strange way. It seems to expect the destination directory to already exist, with the same name as the source directory.

sftp> put -r source
 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/source
 Couldn't canonicalize: No such file or directory
 etc.
sftp> mkdir source
sftp> put -r source
 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/source
 Entering source/
 source/file1
 source/file2

What's especially strange is that this even applies if you give a different name for the destination:

sftp> put -r source dest
 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/dest
 Couldn't canonicalize: ...
sftp> mkdir dest
sftp> put -r source dest
 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/dest/source
 Couldn't canonicalize: ...
sftp> mkdir dest/source
sftp> put -r source dest
 Uploading source/ to /home/myself/dest/source
 Entering source/
 source/file1
 source/file2

For a better-implemented recursive put, you could use the PuTTY psftp command line tool instead. It's in the putty-tools package under Debian (and most likely Ubuntu).

Alternately, Filezilla will do what you want, if you want to use a GUI.

You might be interested in using rsync instead. The command for that would be

 rsync --delete --rsh=ssh -av bin/ remote-ip-or-fqdn:/home/earlz/blah/bin/

This will copy everything in bin/ and place it in on the remote server in /home/earlz/blah/bin/. As an added benefit, it will first check to see if the file on the remote side hasn't changed, and if it hasn't, it won't re-send it. Additionally, you can add a -z option and it will compress it for you.