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Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice to see some good non-HTTP uses. The manpage says:

> curl is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols (DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP).

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I use it for IMAP, it works great!

I even filed a feature request to support different authorization/authentication (e.g. shared inboxes accessed through a regular user account), and one of the contributor implemented it. Had a great experience :)

I do wonder what the point of using curl for SCP would be instead of using the scp tool itself.

If you write a script and it takes a URL argument to download or upload stuff and you use curl for it, you get transparent support for a buttload of protocols easily, so there's that.

Also, the manpage says:

> curl is powered by libcurl for all transfer-related features.

So, that means you get the same benefit when using libcurl from other programming languages.

FWIW, scp is deprecated (but I believe that's the entire protocol, not just the tool, though the tool is ludicrously slow and awkward).

Where you hear that? Deprecated in favor of what other tool? As far as I know, there's no other tool that lets you specify files with arbitrary server-side code, like the following example:

  scp -T server:'$(ls -t * | head -1)' .

In the OpenSSH 8.0 release notes they state that "The scp protocol is outdated, inflexible and not readily fixed. We recommend the use of more modern protocols like sftp and rsync for file transfer instead.", which has been widely reported (so if you just searched Google for "scp deprecated" instead of trying to undermine the statement with nothing but a statement of doubt, it would have come up immediately) as an informal deprecation; afaik the only thing stopping them from formally deprecating it is a lack of a direct replacement (such as giving sftp a few more affordances).

> so if you just searched Google for "scp deprecated" instead of trying to undermine the statement with nothing but a statement of doubt, it would have come up immediately

I had looked it up with precisely those keywords[1] and nothing that seemed like scp was deprecated came up. However, I admit I didn't use Google.

Also, it wasn't a statement of doubt as much as it was a request for information and an expression of frustration in case it was true. Thank you for answering, by the way.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=scp+deprecated&t=ffab&ia=web

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