PuTTY wish pscp-filemodes

Home | FAQ | Feedback | Licence | Updates | Mirrors | Keys | Links | Team
Download: Stable · Snapshot | Docs | Privacy | Changes | Wishlist

It would be nice if PSCP and PSFTP could allow user control of the file permissions on files they create during transfers in both directions.

As of r9260, permissions are preserved (modulo umask) by the Unix file transfer tools, in both directions and in both SCP and SFTP protocols, and the Windows tools use a non-configurable default (which is 0644 when we're speaking SCP, and unspecified in SFTP meaning that the server will use its default).

It would be nice to have more control over this. Thoughts include:

• Ability to configure the default used on Windows.
• Ability to inhibit propagation of existing permissions on Unix, reverting to the Windows-like behaviour (and, as per previous bullet point, ability to configure that default again).
• Ability to partially propagate existing permissions on Unix. For instance, sometimes you only want to propagate the one property of whether a file is executable or not: imagine a situation in which on one machine all your files are habitually go-rwx and on another they're merely o-rwx. Copying executable files like scripts from the one to the other would want to translate -rwx------ to -rwxr-x--- and vice versa, whereas copying non-executable files would want to translate -rw------- to -rw-r----- and vice versa. It's not clear how extensive needs in this area might be, and hence what the configuration interface ought to look like. Perhaps a good starting point would just be to add an option to normalise the input permissions into one of -rwxrwxrwx or -rw-rw-rw, and then let the umask take care of the rest.