disabling local-to-local transfers?

[Philipp Marek]

> It does add "-p" if requested:
...
> Hence:
> 
> scp <local1> <local2> should behave identically to cp <local1> <local2>
> scp -p <local1> <local2> should behave identically to cp -p <local1> 
> <local2>
> 
> which I think satisfies POLS.

Still, my (Debian) manpage says

|   -p     same as --preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps

and that's what I empirically observe.


> Regarding xattrs, are you saying that scp <local> <remote> preserves 
> xattrs but scp <local> <local> does not?  That would be an 
> inconsistency if it were the case, but I've never needed to test this, 
> and I don't see any instance of "xattr" in the openssh-portable source.

My point is: for local use "scp" is only a little bit better than
     cat < source > target

With -p it keeps _some_ metadata, but xattrs are lost.
So perhaps it would be less surprising to reject local copies _by 
default_ --
missing xattrs might be hard(er) to debug.


That for _remote_ copies xattr are lost, too, is another data-point --
but maybe not that important, as filesystems, OS, etc. differ
in whether they support xattrs at all.

(I wouldn't expect a Linux => some network switch scp to retain xattrs,
nor that AIX understands SELinux values, etc.)