@bagder honestly I had no idea that it did this already. But I also wonder if it’s not growing beyond the “do one thing really well” philosophy. SSH and others in Curl feels very foreign to me.

@bagder adding 'ssh://' seems like it would introduce a fair amount of confusion. What features of an ssh client should curl itself implement? Does that implementation become some sort of ad hoc RPC protocol?

@bagder for me, that sounds like introducing a new kind of command line injection🫣

@bagder my impression is that the main scope of cURL is to fetch remote files (and push files to remotes that supports it).
From that point of view:
- support the SCP and SFTP protocols makes totally sense
- support remote execution of arbitrary command would fall under scope creep (and open too mant new cans of worms) (and also increase attack surface by giving opportunity for new creative abuse of the feature)

@bagder

But libcurl can’t support this except in builds where it links to libssh2. And this means that any program that might take advantage of this is also linked to libssh2. Which means that the real question is:

Is it easier for a program to encode something as a URL and a set of HTTP headers and pass it through libcurl’s APIs, or is it easier for it to pass those same values directly as arguments to libssh2 APIs?

I’ve never used libssh2, so I can’t say with 100% certainty, but I would be shocked if going via an API designed for a completely different kind of interaction is simpler.

The related question is whether there are use cases where you would want a program to either copy a file to / from a server or execute arbitrary code on that server via SSH, depending on user input. I can think of numerous reasons you would want to do that, but they’re all malware.

@bagder this could be practical in a similar way to KDE's fish protocol. One could use cat or dd in case the server side lacks support for SCP or SFTP.

But generally it's really up to what people enjoy doing with the tool. I can write scripts that use wget and ssh just the same, so in this case it would really be the library use case where curl would stand out. In some cases this might really help to interact with embedded devices as which run a version of Dropbear without SCP and SFTP support.

@bagder curl can do POST http requests so seems like a fine addition

@bagder And that feature request is trying to check out some chaos 📚