Bug 424

Summary:	scp mishandles files with spaces in names
Product:	Portable OpenSSH	Reporter:	David desJardins <david>
Component:	scp	Assignee:	OpenSSH Bugzilla mailing list <openssh-bugs>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX
Severity:	normal	CC:	anders, greenrd
Priority:	P2
Version:	-current
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux

Description David desJardins 2002-11-02 07:36:29 AEDT

Reproduce as follows:

% touch "123 456"
% scp "123 456" 789
cp: copying multiple files, but last argument `789' is not a directory
Try `cp --help' for more information.

Using 'cp' works fine in this case.

The same problem occurs in many other cases, e.g., when using scp -r with a
directory which has a space in its name.

Comment 1 Damien Miller 2003-01-03 15:16:20 AEDT

Known, and unfixable, problem with the rcp protocol. A workaround is to
double-quote spaces:

scp "foo\ bar" foo:

We can't fix a 20+ year old, deployed protocol.

Comment 2 Damien Miller 2004-04-14 12:24:18 AEST

Mass change of RESOLVED bugs to CLOSED

Comment 3 Robin Green 2004-12-01 05:33:00 AEDT

*** Bug 957 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Anders Kaseorg 2008-11-03 08:04:05 AEDT

Can someone explain why this is a protocol problem?  If there’s a client-side workaround, why isn’t the filename escaped in the scp client?

This is a potentially nasty security problem for a trusted script that scps files from a remote machine, because a malicious filename containing `` could cause arbitrary code to be executed remotely.

A similar problem exists with the ssh client:

$ touch "123 456" 789; ls
123 456
789
$ ssh host touch "123 456" 789; ssh host ls
123
456
789