bug in scp (OpenSSH)

[Jason Stone]

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> > Are you serious that you want to keep a bug because "this is how the rcp
> > protocol works"? It is clearly flawed.
> 
> should we really change the semantics of a 17 year old protocol, if
> you can use sftp, rsync or tar instead?

This has come up many times before, and the consensus of the developers
seems to be that they're not interested in fixing or adding features to
scp because they want to make scp just the secure version of rcp, and it's
not up to them to change rcp.

They tell you that the features you're looking for can be gotten from sftp
or rsync.  This of course begs the question of why bother with scp at all.

Anyway, you really want to be using rsync rather than scp most of the time
anyway.  While somewhat heavier, rsync has lots more features, most
notably, it defaults to atomic transfers (ie, during the transfer, the
file will never exist in a partial or corrupted state) which are important
in many applications.  I've been encouraging all my users to alias scp to
"rsync -e ssh" - the commandline syntax is close enough in most cases that
users don't notice any difference.


 -Jason

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