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I think the point being that when a filesystem the mv is atomic and just updates an inode but on S3 those operations can take place on thousand of different machines.

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SFTP is not a filesystem, though; to get a rename to be atomic, you must pass SSH_FXF_RENAME_ATOMIC, and the server can return SSH_FX_OP_UNSUPPORTED.

Nearly any SFTP client would assume a rename would be a near-instant operation on the server, and would probably fall-over if it took an hour.

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