[mosh-devel] Application specific agents, side-channel file transfers and triggers

[Timo Sirainen]

On 26.4.2012, at 13.29, Axel Beckert wrote:

> And I frankly think that mosh is definitely the wrong place for
> anything file transfer.

Supporting some kind of generic side channel communication could be useful for other purposes as well. It could work something like:

mosh-sidechannel <type> (on mosh-server)

This would open a new side channel of given type, communicating through stdio. The mosh-client running on user's desktop (i.e. possibly behind multiple mosh connections) would see this, and based on configuration execute the proper executable/script to handle the type.

So for a file transfer you could run:

cat file | mosh-sidechannel file-transfer
<waits until the other side has closed the connection or ctrl-c is hit>

which on the receiving side would execute a script that would either save the file locally or execute some X11 program to ask where the file is saved, etc.

File transfers through mosh (or ssh..) would be really useful when you have to copy files across servers where you have to go through multiple ssh connections.