scp remote path specification

[Jan IVEN]

Hello,

in order to use "scp", the scp binary has to be in the compile-time
default path on the remote host. For some users (like root), we try to
avoid this since scp may be on a network file system (AFS/NFS), and we
don't want to hang root's session on network outages.

Would a patch to scp be acceptable in the main tree that allows to set
the path to remote scp explicity, either as a new command line or as
an ENV variable (it looks like a ssh config file parameter won't work,
since the file is not read by scp itself).

I know that a workaround is to put "PATH=/path/to/bla" into these user's
.ssh/environment or as a parameter to their key, but I don't want this
PATH to be taken for interactive use.

Please advise.

Best regards
Jan Iven

PS: a small patch so that /full/path/to/scp will find the
corresponding local /full/path/to/ssh is appended below.

--- openssh/scp.c~	Sat Oct 28 05:19:58 2000
+++ openssh/scp.c	Tue Nov  7 17:59:37 2000
@@ -245,7 +245,7 @@
 	char *argv[];
 {
 	int ch, fflag, tflag;
-	char *targ;
+	char *targ, *pathsep;
 	extern char *optarg;
 	extern int optind;
 
@@ -253,6 +253,19 @@
 	addargs("ssh");	 	/* overwritten with ssh_program */
 	addargs("-x");
 	addargs("-oFallBackToRsh no");
+
+	/* check explicit path for ssh binary, default is SSH_PROGRAM */
+	if ((argc > 0) &&
+	    (argv[0] != NULL)) {
+	  pathsep = strrchr(argv[0], '/');
+	  if (pathsep != NULL) {
+	    pathsep++;
+	    *pathsep = 0; 
+	    ssh_program = xmalloc(strlen(argv[0]) + 4); /* "../path" + "ssh\0" */
+	    strcpy(ssh_program, argv[0]);
+	    strcat(ssh_program, "ssh");
+	  } 
+	}
 
 	fflag = tflag = 0;
 	while ((ch = getopt(argc, argv, "dfprtvBCc:i:P:q46S:o:")) != EOF)