SCP protocol is fine and convenient as long as people understand that the remote file arguments are server-side shell code, and the consequences that implies.

You get the benefit of being able to e.g. get your last download off your desktop to your laptop like this:

  scp -TO desktop:'downloads/*(oc[1])' .

or this if you're on bash:

  scp -TO desktop:'$(ls -t downloads/* | head -1)' .

or pull a file from a very nested project dir for which you have setup dynamic directories (or shell variables if you're on bash):

  scp -TO desktop:'~foo/config/database.yml' config/

  scp -TO desktop:'$FOO_DIR/config/database.yml' config/

Just don't pull files from an SCP server that may be malicious. Use on trusted servers. If you do the following on your home dir:

  scp -TOr malicious:foo/ .

That may overwrite .ssh/authorized_keys, .zshrc, etc. because `foo/` is server-side shell code. The client can't say that `.zshrc` resulting from the evaluation of `foo/` doesn't make sense, because it might in the remote shell language.

> If you need something that SFTP cannot do, then use tar on both sides.

No reason to make things inconvenient between personal, trusted computers, just because there may be malicious servers out there where one has no reason to SCP.

Something else to note is that your suggestion of using `tar` like `ssh malicious 'tar c foo/' | tar x` faces basically the exact same problem. The server can be malicious and return .ssh/authorized_keys, .zshrc, etc. in the archive for `tar x` to overwrite locally basically exactly the same way. This goes with the point of this SE answer:

> I'd say a lot of Unix commands become unsafe if you consider a MITM on SSH possible. A malicious sudo could steal your password, a malicious communication client could read your mails/instant messages, etc. Saying that replacing scp with sftp when talking to a compromised server will somehow rectify the situation is very optimistic to say the least. [...] In short, if you don't pay attention to which servers you SSH into, there's a high risk for you to be screwed no matter which tools you use, and using sftp instead of scp will be only marginally safer. --- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/571293/is-scp-unsaf...

I think this whole problem with SCP just stems from not having properly documented this aspect in the manpage, so people expected it to just take filepaths.

> the remote terminal management console didn't support pasting and the default config only gave you like 30s to login

I would have used AutoHotkey or something similar in such a scenario.

My guess would be mounting an NTFS partition - with ntfs-3g it will load everything as 777 just by default, since it can’t translate the permissions.

Also a gentle reminder that backups without periodic drills are just binary blobs. I had an instance where for some reason my Borg backups where corrupted. Only caught them with periodic drills.

I occasionally use `scp` around my network and have for years. It works great and its simple interface is easy to remember. I don't want to sftp if I have to use tar on both sides. I might type rsync and but then I remember something about the trailing slash will cause the command to behave differently the second time. I just don't need yet another syntax I'll misremember. As long as scp is in my distro's repositories, I'll be using it.

rsync -avz -e ssh /local/ftw/ user@foo:/ftw/

>If you need something that SFTP cannot do, then use tar on both sides.

Wouldn't tar do the exact same thing to that file's permissions?

"I have a few observations about this article."

I have a few observations about this comment.

Generally use whatever works to do the job. Do think about security, so if you end up streaming stuff across the internet using scp really consider your life choices.

In reality, you will probably be copying stuff on or across local nets or across a VPN because port 22 is (of course) unavailable from !RFC1918(etc).

Use the tool for the job and don't pontificate (unless you know best!)

What I want is to be able to drag and drop files in my remote server to and from my desktop as if it's an NFS/NAS. What's the best option for this that will fully saturate the link?

you sound so wise and produce excellent reference, but in the next breath you show NFS in use?

signed -confused

> Their pscp implementation is a better drop-in replacement than the OpenSSH solutions.

What makes it a better drop in replacement?

I've seen users who have every file set to 777. They do it to "avoid permissions issues"

Well, everybody has 1777 as /tmp (with the sticky bit).

  $ ll -d /tmp
  drwxrwxrwt. 20 root root 4096 Mar  3 12:19 /tmp
  $ mkdir mytmp
  $ chmod 1777 mytmp
  $ ll -d mytmp
  drwxrwxrwt. 1 luser lgroup 0 Mar  3 12:19 mytmp

easy to remember, if you don't use trailing slashes ever, it will just work every time

I suspect you're hitting the page where they're running https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/

Perhaps you got bot flagged or something

I for one appreciate this genre of comment. It's these days kinda one of the only things still redeemable on this particular website. I dont have to agree with it or end up using it, but its always good to see.

You get rid of some (wannabe-)greybeard nerd sniping someone's technical blog about an obscure linux util? What would even be left here? Just B2B SaaS AI blah blah forever?

You wan't them to couch this in "great job! Use whatever your comfortable with!" Are we really at that point?

Why the `-e ssh` there?

At least for me, rsync (on Debian) knows by default to use ssh. :)

Likely, but maintaining hard links is more of what I was thinking.

Yes, since it would’ve copied the globbed files, rather than the current directory itself.

rsync over ssh

Using './*' would have avoided this in most shells because ordinary globbing excludes dotfiles, so .ssh and authorized_keys are not matched. In my experience scp is brittle for bulk syncs, so I run rsync -a --exclude='.ssh' --dry-run ./ user@host:~/target to verify before I commit the changes. I keep an out of band recovery path, like a temporary deploy key, a nonprivileged rescue user, or console access, as the only reliable way to avoid being locked out at 3AM.

It's not supposed to do that unless it's newly creating the destination, or you supplied the -p flag to preserve permissions... that's what the entire issue is about; it's a bug that was fixed in 10.3.

Heh I can remember doing that, in the distant past.

Well, maybe not everybody

  $ ls -ld /tmp
  drwxrwx--x. 2 shell shell 40 Jan 15  2022 /tmp

edit: sorry, I should have added this is termux :)

Allow me to introduce you to the Berkeley R-Utilities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_r-commands

They do the job, quite well.

I suggest that you use them for all your production needs, exclusively!

I don't know about saturating the link, Buy sshfs can mount remote dirs and then you can drag and drop

KDE/Dolphin has support for sftp built in. If you have sshd on your server you can just open/bookmark sftp://host/path/ as a folder and use it normally. I get around 0.9Gbit/s on a 1Gbit/s link.

CIFS/Samba has had a lot of effort put into it, so setup Tailscale and just use that, if you're after drag and drop.

What would you use for remote mounting filesystems? I don't know of any that are simply superior (w/o caveats/tradeoffs).

I upvoted you, and yes, cleartext NFS is a concern.

I had it wrapped in stunnel TLS, but I ripped that out recently as I am retiring and the new staff is simply not capable of maintaining that configuration.

My users were yelling, and the patch to tinysshd to omit all permissions checks silenced the complaints. No, it's not pretty.

rclone has a web gui https://rclone.org/gui/

That URL gives me a 418 I'm a teapot error with no body. I'm guessing they don't like my VPN.

Why is it so self-evident that NFS is bad?

Several reasons.

-PuTTY pscp allows raw passwords on the command line, or from a file. OpenSSH is unreasonable in refusing to do this.

-Scripting can adapt to a .netrc easily; OpenSSH will never do this.

-Modern OpenSSH is a nightmare when using legacy crypto, while pscp is fluid. There is nothing wrong with hmac-md5, and no reason to refuse it. I will take PuTTY or dropbear in a heartbeat over these burned bridges and workarounds.

https://www.openssh.org/legacy.html

-pscp does not link to dozens of libraries as ssh/scp does, so it is easier to build with less dependency. The ldd output of ssh and scp on rhel9 is 23 libraries, while PuTTY is 3 [package obtained from EPEL].

-pscp strongly leans to SFTP on the backend and can be directed to use it exclusively, so there is no ambiguity.

-Using pscp with a retry on fail is much easier than sftp -b.

-The wacky cipher control on rhel8 does not impact the PuTTY tools.

That is an extensive list.

The problem was not scp'ing the .ssh/ directory. The problem was scp'ing a directory whose permissions were 777, and "mapping" it (cannot find a better term) to a remote directory, which happened to be the home directory. The remote home directory therefore had its permissions changed to 777, which was deemed "too open" by openssh which refuses to use any file in it.

I wouldn't even expect it on newly created stuff without the -p flag. Normal cp doesn't do it.

Security is optional in NFS 4, and practically non-existent before. The standard Linux NFS client does not implement security.

> The Linux NFS client does not yet support certain optional features of the NFS version 4 protocol, such as security negotiation, server referrals, and named attributes.

> man 5 nfs

> -PuTTY pscp allows raw passwords on the command line, or from a file. OpenSSH is unreasonable in refusing to do this.

You can use `sshpass` to force it through a command line argument. However, arguments can be viewed by any process through `/proc`, `ps`, etc. It's pretty reasonable to not support exposure of the password like that, especially since you can force it through using another tool if you really, really need to.

That only means that if you need these kinds of security guarantees you need to look for another solution. A bad software would be one that advertises security but in practice the implementation would be full of holes, for instance with Microsoft Active Directory: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/12/microsoft-will-fina...

Both pscp and psftp have -pwfile.

It is not reasonable to insist on keys for batch use.

Not at all.

It's completely crazy to use passwords when you needn't. Passwords are a human readable shared secret, they were already obsolete when SSHv1 was invented last century.

From the outset SecSH (SSHv2, the thing you actually use today and if you're younger, likely the only thing you ever have used) has public key authentication as a Mandatory To Implement feature. Implementations where that doesn't work aren't even SSH, they're garbage.

I am forced by external vendors and internal security to use password authentication for SFTP.

I do not have a choice!

This grew out of FTP less than a decade ago. Everyone has always known password auth; it cannot die.

Are you on the same planet as the rest of us?

If our vendor required a password auth, I want three sandboxes between it and anything production. Its an explosion waiting to happen.

It can die once we stop letting it keep living with this kind of defeatist attitude