data streaming using SFTP

[William Ahern]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 12:13:29AM -0500, joshua stein wrote:
> > Why must you use SFTP, which is a "file transfer protocol"?
> > 
> > What you want is trivial with straight SSH:
> 
> because sometimes the host you're connecting to only provides sftp
> access without a real shell that can run arbitrary commands.  such
> is the case with a backup provider like strongspace.com.
> 
> sftp(1) refuses to upload from /dev/stdin, but if the checks are
> altered with the hack below (against openbsd src), it works, but
> it's not pretty:

Initially I had assumed the file size might be a critical part of the
protocol. But reading the spec it looks like SFTP is just a simple way to
export Unix I/O--read, write, mkdir--across the network. Now I understand :)