Reg sftp commands

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Venugopal Rao <venugrda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In ftp we have binary and site commands. what are the relevant commands in
> sftp. The problems we are facing are mainframe binary conversion from ASCII
> when sending files to mainframe from Unix. And file size allocations when
> sending large files(in ftp we can specify size using site).
>
> Thanks,
> Venu.

There are quite a few FTP behaviors that SFTP does not support. If you
think of SFTP as being "SCP with a command line interface", instead of
being "secured FTP", you'll be closer to the reality of it. SFTP, for
example, is "binary-only". You can't enable 'end-of-line" conversions
in it, and it doesn't handle differences in local time settings
between clients and servers well.

If you need FTPs subtler features, then I'd urge you to switch to
FTPS, and use the 'vsftpd' daemon. That also supports symlinks and the
full FTP command line toolset, and it's much easier to segregate
individual clients to individual, distinct, effectively chrooted
directories for access. It's also usable with tools like the "lftp"
mirror command to mirror a remote repository, instead of simply
downloading it.

Alternatively, I've found myself actually preferring to use "git" for
complex local file synchronization. That allows me to maintain
slightly distinct variants of the same content for slightly distinct
local environments, to efficiently download local changes much the
lftp 'mirror' or rsync based commands, and to allow recording and
publishing local changes to a central git repo more effectively, with
changes bothlogged and reversible. Git might not work well for large
binary directories, but it's a thought.