Possibility of scp --interactive option

[Christoph Groth]

Hello,

Now that scp uses the sftp protocol, wouldn’t it be a good idea to add
an --interactive option à la cp to it?

It seems to me that one common usage of scp is to make sure that the
files being copied are available on the remote machine, but without
overwriting anything (and certainly not silently).  I find myself very
often in this situation, but judging by the number of questions about
such a possibility on the web, I am not the only one.

rsync’s --ignore-existing does not help, because it skips files
silently.

An --interactive option that behaves just like the one in cp would solve
the issue for me.  I would happily alias scp to scp --interactive.  Is
there any technical or other reason why scp does not have such an option
or something similar?

Cheers
Christoph
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