On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 06:41:56PM -0500, Jeffrey Watts wrote:
I'd like to point out that SFTP isn't really "superior". It's much, much more secure, but it's not "superior" to FTP. It has commands that are similar to FTP, but it's not completely command-compatible, and there are a LOT of things that FTP can do that SFTP can not.
I recently had to move some Expect scripts over from using FTP to SFTP, and it was a royal pain in the ass. In general I'm not very impressed with SFTP. It seems to be someone's weekend project, not a fully functional subsystem. If you need an example just look at the output, and try to suppress/redirect it in a useful manner. Then try the same with FTP. SFTP could really use some community effort in improving it, especially considering that a lot of businesses (like Sprint) are using it heavily in-house.
Jeffrey.
Why not just use SCP? That's what I encouraged the Sprint groups I worked with to use. SFTP is designed for interactive use, and SCP is designed for scripted use. Otherwise they both run over the SSH protocol, and indeed are part of the OpenSSH package.
Thanks, -- Hal