Suggestion: Man page clarification

Adam McKenna adam-openssh at flounder.net
Wed Sep 5 05:43:19 EST 2001


scp, when copying directories with the "-r" flag, uses the same "trailing 
slash" syntax as rsync, i.e., if a trailing slash is given on the source 
directory, it will copy the contents of that directory to the destination, 
instead of the directory itself.

rsync has a special section in the man page that points out that this is
actually expected behavior, it would be nice if scp also had this information
in the man page.

I've attached a patch for scp.1 which I believe addresses the issue.

Thanks,

--Adam

-- 
Adam McKenna <adam at flounder.net>   | 
http://flounder.net/publickey.html |
GPG: 17A4 11F7 5E7E C2E7 08AA      | What's up with my email address?
     38B0 05D0 8BF7 2C6D 110A      | http://software.libertine.org/tmda
-------------- next part --------------
--- scp.1.orig	Tue Sep  4 12:32:55 2001
+++ scp.1	Tue Sep  4 12:42:19 2001
@@ -71,7 +71,9 @@
 Preserves modification times, access times, and modes from the
 original file.
 .It Fl r
-Recursively copy entire directories.
+Recursively copy entire directories.  A trailing slash (/) on a source file 
+name means "copy the contents of this directory".  Without a trailing slash 
+it means "copy the directory and all of its contents".
 .It Fl v
 Verbose mode.
 Causes


More information about the openssh-unix-dev mailing list