On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:10 PM, Hal Duston hald@kc.rr.com wrote:
On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 06:41:56PM -0500, Jeffrey Watts wrote:
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.
I agree with you completely, and believe it or not, there are commercial applications that support sftp yet do not support scp (as hard as that is to believe). The particular application we're interacting with using sftp simply does not support use of scp. It supports sftp reasonably well. How that works internally, I have no idea, but scp is a no go. This is proprietary SSH software running on a server owned by a service vendor that we have no control over.