https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2809
Bug ID: 2809 Summary: SCP gives very confusing / wrong error message when -p is used incorrectly Product: Portable OpenSSH Version: 7.5p1 Hardware: Other OS: Linux Status: NEW Severity: normal Priority: P5 Component: scp Assignee: unassigned-b...@mindrot.org Reporter: m...@nh2.me When the user assumes `-p` does the same for scp as it does for ssh, funny things happen: touch myfile scp -p 22 myfile targetmachine:targetfile The above prints "scp: targetfile: No such file or directory", which, while true (there is no file called "targetfile" on the host -- the users intent was to put it there), is a very confusing error message. The problem here is that `-p` doesn't accept an argument for scp as it does for ssh, and so "22" is treated as a file name. It is the file "22" that doesn't exist. Let's touch ~/targetfile on `targetmachine`. What happens then? $ scp -p 22 myfile zh.nh2.me:targetfile scp: targetfile: Not a directory Certainly true, targetfile is not a directory. Nevertheless, not quite the error message the user would hope for. What if we make `targetfile` a directory then (`rm ~/targetfile && mkdir targetdir` on targethost)? $ scp -p 22 myfile zh.nh2.me:targetdir 22: No such file or directory myfile 100% 0 0.0KB/s 00:00 Finally an error message that points out what the user did wrong. Would it be possible to improve scp's error messages, such that for this very common error of using `-p` incorrectly, the earlier examples point out more helpfully to the user that "22" doesn't exist? Thanks! -- You are receiving this mail because: You are watching the assignee of the bug. _______________________________________________ openssh-bugs mailing list openssh-bugs@mindrot.org https://lists.mindrot.org/mailman/listinfo/openssh-bugs