Hello Norman, On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 9:56 PM, Norman Hardy <norm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I discovered this problem on Apple's version of Linux. > Two other systems had the same problem however. > Google recommended you for man page bugs. Sorry--only for some man pages. scp(1) isn't one of them, but take a look here: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man_pages_other.html Cheers, Michael > I may try to find out how to submit this to Apple too. > > The man page for scp is misleading. > The last of the sequence of file operands is the destination directory name and not a file name. > I conclude this from the claimed ancestry of the "rcp" command and also a few tests. > The man page for rcp is clearer in this regard. > It also seems to work if the last entry is indeed a file name at least if that name matches the source name. > I have not tested other possibilities. > I do not rule out the possibility that there is a bug in destination computer's scpd deamon, but it seems unlikely to me. > I have done the test on two distinct destination systems. > > To be clear the tests that I have done carefully follow: > > I performed the following two shell commands: > > scp t1 ootbcomp.com:scpTest > scp t2 t3 ootbcomp.com:scpTest > > I then verified that files t1, t2 and t3 had been correctly transmitted to the machine ootbcomp.com, into directory ~/scpTest where tilda evaluates to the same string on both machines. > > This is useful behavior which I use and which cannot be explained by the scp man page on any of several *nix systems that I tried. > > I suspect that I do not understand scp's behavior and thus decline to suggest how the man page should be fixed. -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Author of "The Linux Programming Interface"; http://man7.org/tlpi/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
