Re: Problems tranfering files over shell link (ssh).

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

On Sun, 4 May 2003, Christian Dysthe wrote:

> I am using MC 4.6.0 on Mandrake 9.1. I do a lot of SSH file transfers,
> but I do have a problem using MC for this when doing recursive
> transfers, or transfers of more than one selected file at a time. What
> happens in that the first file transfers fine, but the second doesn't
> complete and MC hangs or comes with an error message about not being
> able to chmod. Monitoring my IP traffic shows that the ssh connection
> is being closed on the client side for some reason after the first
> file. The strange thing is that this only happens with larger files
> (over 1MB). A lot of smaller files transfers fine.
>
> I am not able to determine what's wrong, so help would be greatly
> appreciated.

dd on the remote size fails to read the whole block of data from ssh.
That's why the block size was reduced in version 4.6.0, but it's still not
enough.  Reducing the block size to 1 would cure the problem, but it would
make the transfer very slow.  Since dd reads less data than it should, the
rest of the data goes to the subshell, and it usually exits.

Actually, dd is a bad choice for the remote command because it ignores
incomplete reads, but there is no other widespread utility that would read
a certain amount of data and then stop.  I hope I'm missing something, but
I asked in the mc-devel mailing list and nobody could come with anything
better than dd.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin