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scp only appears to have simplicity because it outsources large parts of its functionality (e.g. glob expansion) to the destination host's shell. scp/rcp was a great protocol for 1981 (yes, that's when it was introduced) but not for 2019

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And this leads to the question.. OpenBSD is famous for removing unwanted or outdated code. What makes scp a special case? Is it too used to be deprecated and removed?

yeah, pretty much. If someone implemented scp's command-line with sftp underneath then we could start the (slow) deprecation process.

its part of the ssh protocol, getting rid of cruft from network protocols is almost completely impossible unfortunately, because its going to destroy many people's workflows, in a way that they can not fix, guaranteed.

Yes, we all know about xkcd, no need to link guys.

scp isn't part of the ssh protocol. It's a command that runs over it.

Out of curiosity, since I wasn't sure which one in particular throwaway2048 was talking about, here are my closest guesses:

927 - Standards - https://xkcd.com/927/

1127 - Workflow - https://xkcd.com/1172/

1323 - Protocol - https://xkcd.com/1323/

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