How to best capture and log scp output?

Question

I am trying to capture output from an install script (that uses scp) and log it. However, I am not getting everything that scp is printing out, namely, the progress bar. <

Answer 1

None of the answers here worked for me, I needed to recursively copy large directory with lot of files over long geo distance, so I wanted to log the progress (&& echo success! was by far not enough).

What I finally engineered and somehow worked was:

scp -vrC root@host:/path/to/directory . 2> copy.log &

With -v doing the trick of verbose logging (-C allows compression and -r recursion).

Grepping the logfile

grep file copy.log | wc -l

allowed me to see the number of files copied so far.