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Comment by mjg59 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the version included in git for Windows doesn't and you have to emulate sockets using magic files instead...

AFAIR you can choose to use Windows OpenSSH or the other one during Git for Windows installation. [0]

Unfortunately it's difficult to enforce that, so dealing with users who've already set things up in a specific way is a problem

could always ship a static linked ssh_client

What is so great about Unix sockets that e.g. a normal TCP socket bound to localhost or even a named pipe can not do properly?

UNIX Sockets are more flexible than named pipes;

* You can use them for more than two processes communicating (eg. a server process with potentially multiple client processes connecting);

* They are bidirectional;

* They support passing kernel-verified UID / GID credentials between processes;

* They support passing file descriptors between processes;

* They support packet and sequenced packet modes.

TCP only grants you 2 of these extra features (sequenced packet mode/bidirection), leaving a giant hole in security in the process.

The named pipes, at least on Windows, also support all of that except for passing UID/GID and file handles.

The server can get the calling process info [0], which may be useful for local access control. TCP sockets cannot distinguish clients like that.