disabling local-to-local transfers?

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

Theo de Raadt, le ven. 24 juil. 2026 08:33:50 -0600, a ecrit:
> Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> > Are local-to-local "transfers" really a useful feature?
> > 
> >   scp foo my.server.com
> > 
> > forgetting to type the trailing ':' creates a "my.server.com" file
> > instead of producing an error.
> > 
> > I have *never* seen this feature useful to me, while I get hit by the
> > issue from times to times, and I have to remove the "my.server.com"
> > file getting created. Worse, it did cost me a lot of time this morning
> > because I didn't notice that the file didn't actually get transferred,
> > and thus I used a previous version, which submitted 3 days of work to my
> > server...
> > 
> > Could there at least be an option which we can put in one's default
> > config or shell aliases to disable the local-to-local transfer and
> > produce an error instead?
> 
> No way.  scp(1) is a a derivative of the old CSRG rcp(1) codebase,
> and this behaviour has existed for decades, and we have no idea how many
> scripts happen to be using this.  We simply don't know, and we cannot
> break those scripts.

I have never asked for changing the default. I just asked for being able
to configure it.

> Additionally, this is clearly documented:

Making it documented does not make the problem disappear.

> Improve your typing skills.

I have been typing fine for 35 years already. But there will still
always be typoes, and tools are meant to *help* people, not give them
useless features that essentually always hurt them.

Really, has anybody here really ever used this feature?

Samuel