RE: New draft-draft of sftp...

[Richard Whalen <Whalenr%process.com@localhost>]

The SCP that I am familiary (F-Secure code) does client side "globbing", not
server side.
The command line given in the example would cause it to get a directory
listing and apply the matching rules to the list of files received.

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Tatham [mailto:anakin%pobox.com@localhost]
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 12:07 PM
To: jaltman%columbia.edu@localhost
Cc: Darren J Moffat; ietf-ssh%netbsd.org@localhost
Subject: Re: New draft-draft of sftp...


Jeffrey Altman <jaltman%columbia.edu@localhost> wrote:

> Exactly.  Which goes directly to reason why globbing must be done on
> the system on which the file system is mounted.  It is only on that
> system that the appropriate matches can be done by the file system.
> Trying to guess what the file system is capable or not capable of will
> only produce inaccurate results.

But this is only one side of the story. The other side is the user
expectations, and the security angle.

SCP is a good example of a protocol that does server-side globbing,
and it's one most people on this list will have heard of :-) So
suppose I'm an SCP user and I type a command such as

  scp myserver:[abc]*.* .

to retrieve some files matching a wildcard, and copy them into my
current directory. The server will now send back a list of file
names and file contents, and my client program will create some
files locally.