scp logging

[Roy L Butler]

Jerel,

Crosland, Jerel wrote:
> The ability to log even just the names of the files being transferred, and possibly their sizes, has been a requested feature since early 2000 (over six years!!) and I've yet to see any of the developers on this list respond directly. I've found a patch from Václav Tomec here: http://sweb.cz/v_t_m/ but it includes lots of other stuff (SecureID implementation and a tweak for being able to select allow/deny users for each kind of authentication) which I don't need and don't want to "support". 
> 
> Every file manipulation utility available for the Unix/Linux world provides the ability to log what it is doing, except for scp and sftp. This is crazy!! It displays the "progress meter" as long as the output is directed to a screen, but if you redirect stdout to a file, it disables all output, except errors! Is there really only about 10 of us in the entire world that want to use scp in a script, and want a log of what it did? I find that hard to believe!!! Is this planned as a feature in some future release, or is it just being ignored? It's insane that there's no way to log the output! You can't use -o LOGLEVEL=something and if you use -v or the debug logging level, tons of stuff spews out, but not one single line that contains the file name, it's size, and an indication of the status of the transfer.
> 
> Am I just nuts for expecting this?

At first, I thought you meant logging on the server, and thought "Yeah, 
that would be cool".  It follows along the lines of web and FTP servers 
usually logging uploads, but I can see how it doesn't necessarily fall 
within sshd's needed facilities (who knows, maybe it is there and I just 
don't know it).

But from reading further, it sounds like what you're complaining about, 
is the lack of logging on the client side.  If that's the case, I have 
two comments for you, one about open source, and one that is a technical 
solution to your wish, if you'll allow it to be so:

- If you want something from an open source project, you usually need to 
step up to the plate with code.  If it's accepted, great.  If not, fork. 
  People who aren't getting paid to do something for you aren't going to 
deal with a bad attitude.

- Use rsync over ssh.  It will provide you all of the logging you like, 
as well as the ability to perform incremental pushes depending on 
source/destination contents.

Hope this helps.  If not, you could also probably pay a commercial 
vendor to implement your requests...


Roy