scp not tolerant of extraneous shell messages

[Damien Miller]

On Wed, 2002-07-03 at 05:46, Bryan Henderson wrote:
> >Perhaps scp could have a special -diagnose option which runs 'echo
> >hello' at the remote end, and checks that the text received is just
> >'hello'.  That would save unfortunate users a lot of headscratching in
> >future. 
> 
> That would certainly be a nice thing to do for the users -- though actually
> harder to do than just making scp act like the terminal emulator download
> program that it is and just ignore junk before the protocol starts.

What is wrong with "ssh somehost /bin/true"? 

This has long been documented at http://www.openssh.com/faq.html#2.9

-d