Description of problem: scp should have a -u option (update) like cp does. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): openssh-5.2p1-31 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. man scp 2. /-u / Actual results: 2. Pattern not found Expected results: 2. -u. --update copy only when the SOURCE file is newer than the destination file or when the destination file is missing Additional info: In this day and age it is something of an anachronism that we still have cp, rcp, scp all as separate applications. The copying of a file from one place to another should be relatively seamless, and the one 'cp' should be able to do it all. If 'scp' functionality was incorporate into 'cp', or if 'scp' had a -u option then we could probably get rid of stop-gap programs like 'rsync'. I would prefer to see a better 'cp' which supported network/intra-host copying. It would have an optional '-x' flag to control encryption, which would default to on for network copying. Maybe this might also be a coreutils bug? But in any case since scp will be around for many more years, it should have a simple -u option.
OpenSSH upstream declared that they will not add any new features to scp and they declared it a legacy application. We will not diverge from upstream here. If you have any special arguments which could convince upstream to implement your proposal, you can try to report the feature request here to the upstream bugzilla: http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/