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At least on Debian, rsh is just a symlink for ssh, and rcp is just scp.

That's an interesting choice; I'm not sure it's a good one. While I don't want anyone using the old r protocols, I also don't really want transparent redirects to other protocols. What if a Debian user was in the habit of using "rcp file somehost" and found themselves working on a non-Debian system where rcp was not linked to a secure command?

I'd expect scp to detect (using argv[0]) that it is called through a symlink and behave as rcp, not scp. This is how busybox is implemented, with many programs in one binary.

If it did I'd be really disappointed in the openssh developers.

But, I can see the logic behind your expectation. Bash behaves in POSIX compatibility mode (mostly) when called with 'sh', vim acts like vi when called with 'vi', etc. But, when security is the feature being completely removed to achieve compatibility, it'd be hard to argue it's a good idea.

Indeed, as a regular rsh user, this caught me out; it seems a poor choice to replace a working command with a non-functional alternative (and obviously ssh doesn't want to add a feature like silently falling back to rsh).

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