scp not tolerant of extraneous shell messages

[Edward Avis]

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On 3 Jul 2002, Damien Miller 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'.

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

Not as idiot-proof.

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

But as evidenced by previous messages to this list, some people - even
intelligent, relatively clueful people - do not read the FAQ, or forget
what it says.  They might be more likely to find the right answer if scp
gave a bit more prompting (either with -diagnose or with a different
error message).  Besides, scp -diagnose could be a place to test for
other common scp problems, beside spurious stdout text.

The reason for the suggestion is not technical, it's more like a kind of
additional documentation.

- -- 
Ed Avis <epa98 at doc.ic.ac.uk>
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