SFTP: a new command to get filesystem size/free space

[Damien Miller]

On Sun, 18 Feb 2007, Thue Janus Kristensen wrote:

> I am using sshfs with FUSE to mount a remote directory over ssh/sftp
> (on linux).
>
> It would be nice if df could be able to show the total size/free space
> of the mounted directory.
>
> I am aware that returning size/free space would have some limitations.
> For example, if a subdir of the mounted directory has another
> filesystem mounted on the remote server, this can not be represented
> simply.
>
> However, I still think that a simple implementation could be useful.
> My idea is to simply return the total size and free space of the
> current working directory.
>
> Would you accept patches implementing this?

We would consider them, sure - but we can't promise we will like
them enough to accept them before we see them :)

The patch would have the best chance of being accepted if it used the
SSH2_FXP_EXTENDED protocol message and followed the message format of
later filexfer drafts for the encoding of filesystem information (IIRC
recent filexfer drafts have a statvfs-like method).

The patch would also need to implement support for it in the sftp
client, so we can have a way to test the method in our regress tests.

> PS: does the openssh sftp implementation conform to
> http://www.openssh.org/txt/draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-02.txt ?  If not,
> is the protocol described elsewhere?

IIRC we actually implement filexfer-03, but the draft for it seems to
have fallen off the net.

-d