That's fair, I agree it should probably stay consistent to what other similar tools do. In that case your implementation is definitely better (I'd forgotten to consider absolute path usages in mine anyway). > On Jul 7, 2025, at 1:45 AM, Damien Miller <djm@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 4 Jul 2025, Andrew Wood wrote: > >>> I don't see the ambuguity here, the thing that will be transferred here >>> will always be the contents of whatever directory ../../foo resolves to >>> as sftp doesn't transfer symlinks (though maybe one day we'll get around >>> to implementing https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428) >> >> My personal thinking is that in every other scenario than with . and >> .. the directory is uploaded along with the contents... not just the >> contents. In FreeBSD, at least, . and .. are not symbolic links, so >> I wouldn't expect them to be treated as symbolic links either. In my >> opinion, .and .. are special cases in how they need to be handled and >> when thinking about how to do so, we should think about what would >> happen in every other scenario, which is that the directory goes along >> with its contents. After all, one could just glob everything if they >> only wanted the contents. > > Are you saying that you want "cd foo; put -r . bar" to create a > directory "foo/bar" and copy the contents of the current directory > into it? > > If so, I don't think that is desirable and don't think it can be > done consistently. > > It's not desirable because other tools don't behave that way, e.g. > > [djm@djm ~]$ cd /tmp > [djm@djm tmp]$ mkdir a b > [djm@djm tmp]$ cd a > [djm@djm a]$ touch b c d > [djm@djm a]$ cp -vvr . /tmp/b > './b' -> '/tmp/b/./b' > './c' -> '/tmp/b/./c' > './d' -> '/tmp/b/./d' > > What tools do behave this way? > > It can't be made consistent because of special cases including > "cd / ; put -r . bar". Also the sftp client may not have read > permissions on .. in all cases. > > -d _______________________________________________ openssh-unix-dev mailing list openssh-unix-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.mindrot.org/mailman/listinfo/openssh-unix-dev
