scp: Problem when source and destination are identical

[Ed L Cashin]

Gert Doering <gert at greenie.muc.de> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 03:07:28PM -0500, Jim Knoble wrote:
> > What i would much rather see is for the destination scp to write the
> > incoming file to a temporary file in the same directory, and then
> > rename() it to the destination file on a successful copy.
> 
> Strongly seconded.  But Markus doesn't seem to like it, for no other
> reason than "you can use tar/mv/rsync to do this".

I agree with Markus, if that's his position.  Commands should do what
we expect, and I don't expect something that looks like a secure
version of rcp to be writing to temporary files and doing rename(2).

> > Against: Requires enough space available on the destination filesystem
> >          to hold both the old and the new copy of each file; this could
> >          be a drawback for large files.
> 
> Which is a good argument for having a switch to control this.

Or just use a different tool, like rsync, that is designed for this
kind of thing.

-- 
--Ed Cashin                   PGP public key:
  ecashin at terry.uga.edu       http://www.terry.uga.edu/~ecashin/pgp/