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actually, sftp is a bit more scriptable than scp. You can pass sftp a "batchfile" of commands and control per-command whether their success should terminate the batch.

scp wins on brevity of commandline syntax

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The script-ability of sftp is pretty awkward, it doesen't conform to how virtually every other tool works in terms of "command + args" in a shell scripting context, instead you need to pass it commands through a pipeline, don't love it.

Would be nice to be able to just type sftp user@domain:/file and have it do the right thing.

Oh, that means you have to open a pipe to the process if you want to control it from another programming language? That would be a bit harder to leverage for automation (though I guess it's just a matter of writing a few helper functions, or you could always use bash and redirections if the language is ill-suited to pipes).

Add lftp on top of sftp and you get extensive scriptability. Working public anonymous demo: [1]

[1] - https://tinyvpn.org/sftp/#lftp

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