HP-UX Reference (11i v2 07/12) - 1 User Commands N-Z (vol 2)

rcp(1) rcp(1)

With the existing implementation of

rcp, the remote copy may result in a system overwrite as described in

the following example.

rcp -r path root@hostname: /

In this example, if you run rcp as root, and unintentionally type a space between the colon (

:) and the

slash (

/), then rcp assumes both path and

root@hostname: (the remote machine’s root directory) as

source.

rcp always interprets the last argument as the destination. Therefore, the destination directory is

the local machine’s root directory (

/). rcp copies the content of path to the root directory (

/) ﬁrst. It then

does another copy with

root@hostname

as source to the root directory (/

) again. This second copy

overwrites the local system’s root directory (

/) with the remote system’s root directory (

/).

DIAGNOSTICS

Diagnostics can occur from both the local and remote hosts. Those diagnostics that occur on the local host

before the connection is completely established are written to standard error. Once the connection is esta-

blished, any error messages from the remote host are written to standard output, like any other data.

Error! could not retrieve authentication type.

Please notify sys admin.

There are two authentication mechanisms used by

rcp. One authentication mechanism is based on

Kerberos and the other is not. The type of authentication mechanism is obtained from a system ﬁle

which is updated by inetsvcs_sec(1M). If the system ﬁle does not contain known authentication types,

the above error is displayed.

AUTHOR

rcp was developed by the University of California, Berkeley.