Dear Sam, Thank you so, so much for being the first truly supportive
person on this or the other fora to which I have posted my question.
I do look forward to an expert responding to my question, and I believe
that this here is the correct forum for it, since it is a basic PHP
question, similar to using FTP to upload files (as I said, FTP works
nicely). There is a forum devoted to security programming in PHP,
http://forums.devnetwork.net/viewforum.php?f=34, so I will post there
soon, also, when I have more time.
I'm not yet ready to post in the official PHP bug reporting system,
because I can't even determine what the proper code is, much less
whether it really fails, or how it fails. I just don't have enough
experience programming private key SFTP. As I said above, I have had
success with the standalone programs CoreFTP and PuTTY, both of which
use private key SFTP.
It makes sense that PHP should be able to do the same thing as these
programs, yet nobody seems to know how to do it. Everybody simply points
me to the same examples again and again, ignoring the fact that I'm not
the only person who finds that these examples fail.
I have in the past been able to write a PHP function that sends email
using SMTP in PHP with full flexibility, but SFTP seems unnecessarily
arcane and complex by comparison.
I'm apparently the only person on the Web who has spent so much time
trying to make this feature of PHP work in spite of the difficulties.
If this lack of information goes on long enough that I approach a
project deadline, I'll just cave in and use phpseclib, which is said to
work.
I do have one good-looking example to test from here, when I have time.
Thanks again for your intelligent words of support.
David
