I’ve come across Mihai Secasiu’s very useful patch for OpenSSH, that enables SCP and SFTP to do atomic copying.

We needed that functionality on one of our servers, so I decided to give it a try. However, we were using OpenSSH 5.3p1 instead of 4.6 (the version the patch was made for) and the patch didn’t apply completely.

After a couple of tweaks, I’ve managed to make it apply on 5.3p1 and, in the same Open Source spirit shown by the original patch author’s , here’s my modified version that applies against 5.3p1:

openssh_scp_sftp_atomic-5.3p1

Check the original patch post on PatchLog for instructions about how to build it and configure. There’s a lot more nice stuff on the site as well.

Nice job Mihai!

Alex