SCP never stops, generates gigabytes of garbage

[gnemo]

Also, ~/.wine/dosdevices are symlinks to various locations. I'd bet one of them is pointing to /

We have a winner!

I ran the "find $HOME -type l -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l" command you suggested, and buried in the output was the following:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 gnemo gnemo   1 2009-06-12 13:55 /home/gnemo/.ies4linux/ie6/dosdevices/z: -> /
lrwxrwxrwx 1 gnemo gnemo   1 2008-08-16 11:41 /home/gnemo/.wine/dosdevices/z: -> /

So, you're absolutely right, Yannick. Wine created links to /, and the scp command followed those. If I'd left it going it would presumably have copied the entire / tree, including /home/gnemo, and then found those same symlinks inside it...endless recursive file copying, anyone?

What I've learned from this: if you use Wine and let it set up its fake Windows drives in your user directory, you then cannot use scp -prv to backup your home directory.

I'll go ahead and mark the thread "solved". Thanks to everyone who chimed in.

-Flieslikeabeagle