Here's a suggestion for a minor enhancement to scp. Currently scp asks you for the remote password even when it's going to ultimately fail because a local path name is broken. I would consider it an enhancement if the local path and file names were checked first, and a failure message emitted without ever prompting for the remote password in this case. Here's a screenshot of what happened recently: #### mark@nollie$ scp asana:file.txt t/ mark@asana's password: t/: No such file or directory ############
Bad idea; information leakage. This would allow anyone, with or without a valid account on the target machine, to check for the existence of a file or directory. Yucky.
I don't understand how this is information leakage. For local files, I can already check if a file exists or not, as well as I can if Irun 'scp' to do it. For uses where scp requires a password, that will of course need to be given before any files are checked as another user, so no information should be leaked there, either. In any case, it's minor optimization. I thought I'd suggest it. I use ssh and scp and everyday and find them extremely useful. Thanks for your work on the project! Mark
If you have a patch to change this behavior then we will consider it. At this point I don't think it is high on any of our todo lists. I believe people have looked at this before and the amount of code that would be touched was greater than most were comfortable with doing. - Ben
I understand. I won't be offended if you send it to the bit bucket, then. :) I can imagine there are more pressing issues to deal with. Thanks for the response. Mark
No, we can't do this because scp isn't actually started until *after* the user is logged in. Therefore it has no opportunity to check.
dtucker@ points out the error of my ways: you can do this for the remote -> local case.