sftp bugs

[Robey Pointer]

On 1 Dec 2005, at 2:01, Jan Hudec wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 10:25:23 +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote:
>> Jan Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz> writes:
>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 19:10:17 -0600, John A Meinel wrote:
>>>> What if we do this:
>>>> sftp://host//absolute/path
>>>> and
>>>> sftp://host/~/relative/path
>>>
>>> The second is a special case of the first ;-). Because ~ expands to
>>> /home/user -- *including* the leading slash...
>>
>> It's expanded by your shell if it's in the first position of a token.
>> Here, it wouldn't be expanded by the shell, and has to be interpreted
>> somewhere in the sftp implementation.
>
> Yes, it has to. But it should be done this way...

Not necessarily.  I tried to explain this in an email yesterday but  
probably just confused the issue. :)

Basically, all SFTP says is that the path can be absolute or  
relative.  It doesn't say relative to what.  OpenSSH chooses to make  
it relative to your home folder, because that's convenient, and it  
knows you have a home folder.  A dedicated standalone SFTP server may  
not be using unix shell accounts for authentication, so you may not  
even have a home folder.  It might make paths relative to your  
project folder, or an arbitrary folder that it thinks is convenient.

It may be hard to imagine right now, since almost all SFTP servers  
are OpenSSH based, but I know of at least two all-python standalone  
SFTP servers, so in the future we're probably going to see more SFTP  
URLs where your authentication is not backed by a unix shell account  
or home folder.

robey

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