Force Sequential Output with SCP?

November 9th, 2024
tech
In my bioinformatics work I often stream files between linux hosts and Amazon S3. This could look like:

$ scp host:/path/to/file /dev/stdout | \
    aws s3 cp - s3://bucket/path/to/file

This recently stopped working after upgrading:

ftruncate "/dev/stdout": Invalid argument
Couldn't write to "/dev/stdout": Illegal seek

I think I figured out why this is happening:

With scp I can give the -O flag:

Use the legacy SCP protocol for file transfers instead of the SFTP protocol. Forcing the use of the SCP protocol may be necessary for servers that do not implement SFTP, for backwards-compatibility for particular filename wildcard patterns and for expanding paths with a '~' prefix for older SFTP servers.

This does work, but it doesn't seem ideal: probably servers will drop support for the SCP protocol at some point? I've filed a bug with OpenSSH.


[1] "man scp" gives me: "Since OpenSSH 8.8 (8.7 in Red Hat/Fedora builds), scp has used the SFTP protocol for transfers by default."

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The odds are good and the goods are great

I stole the title and thesis of this post from the great etirabys and arguably I should just link her post.

via Thing of Things August 31, 2026

Bug blindness

I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this. For a long time, I thought this had something to …

via Posts on August 30, 2026

Microfictions 2

A few more microfictions, still no LLMs.

via Evan Fields August 7, 2026

more     (via openring)