sftp cannot get filenames with "[" and "]" whith space between

[Spayder26]

sftp cannot get a filename named "South Park - 10x08 - Make Love, Not Warcraft [ Subtitulado.al.Castellano] [By.Tetsu].avi", but when I renamed to "South Park - 10x08 - Make Love, Not Warcraft [ Subtitulado.al.Castellano", it can.

sftp shows error when file with filename has "[" "]" character (with a space or more between):
File [...] not found.

But sftp's remote renaming, moving, and more still working.

Commands used:
$: sftp user@192.168.1.35
sftp> get "South Park - 10x08 - Make Love, Not Warcraft [ Subtitulado.al.Castellano] [By.Tetsu].avi"
File "/home/user/South Park - 10x08 - Make Love, Not Warcraft [ Subtitulado.al.Castellano] [By.Tetsu].avi" not found.
sftp> rename "South Park - 10x08 - Make Love, Not Warcraft [ Subtitulado.al.Castellano] [By.Tetsu].avi" "South Park - 10x08 - Make Love, Not Warcraft [ Subtitulado.al.Castellano"
sftp> get "South Park - 10x08 - Make Love, Not Warcraft [ Subtitulado.al.Castellano"
(And works!)

Note: Renaming to "South Park - 10x08 - Make Love, Not Warcraft [ Subtitulado.al.Castellano_ [By.Tetsu_.avi" works too.

EDITED:
very confusing:
I've renamed some files for testing and...
sftp> get "selene ]"
Fetching /home/mluser/selene ] to selene ]
/home/mluser/selene ] 100% 53 0.1KB/s 00:00
sftp> get "selene [ ]"
File "/home/mluser/selene [ ]" not found.
sftp> ls -1
incoming
selene , . [ ]
selene , [ ]
selene [
selene [ ]
selene ]
selene[
selene[]
selene]
selenedb
share.tar.gz

so "selene [ ]" exists!

[Spayder26 (spayder26)]

and getting "selene[]" (whithout spaces) works too.
sftp> get "selene[]"
Fetching /home/mluser/selene[] to selene[]
/home/mluser/selene[] 100% 53 0.1KB/s 00:00

[jjos (jbenjos)]

Hello Spayder26,

What version of Ubuntu are you running? Also can you try substituting [ for \] and seeing if it works like that?

-Jonathan

[Spayder26 (spayder26)]

I've updated description so get "selene []" works, but get "selene[ ]" and "selene[_ ]" don't.

Jonathan, I'm using Ubuntu hardy amd64 as client, and i386 as server, linux 2.6.24-19, and openssh-client and server version 1:4.9p1-8ubuntu1.2.

sftp> ls
incoming selene , . [ ] selene , [ ] selene [ selene [ ] selene [] selene ] selene[ selene[ ] selene[ _] selene[]
selene[_ ] selene] selene][ _ selenedb share.tar.gz
sftp> get "selene[_ ]"
File "/home/mluser/selene[_ ]" not found.
sftp> get "selene[_ \]"
Bad escaped character '\\]'

As you see, using \ throws error.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

You probably need to substitute both [ and ], e.g.:

  get "selene\[_ \]"

(I suspect OpenSSH 5.1p1 in Intrepid has more sensible handling here, although I haven't tested it; there was certainly a comment in the upstream release notes about all this having been cleaned up.)

[Spayder26 (spayder26)]

sftp> get "selene \[ \]"
Bad escaped character '\\['

Doesn't.

Can someone test this issue?

[Spayder26 (spayder26)]

Sorry for my misspellings, I'm not very fine yesterday and today at morning hehe.

[Spayder26 (spayder26)]

Can anybody reproduce the issue?

[Caspar Clemens Mierau (leitmedium)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this problem. It is actually not a bug but rather normal behaviour. The trouble you are in is that special characters need to be "escaped". This are not only brackets, but also white spaces like " ". So, if you want to transfer a file try this:

file name "test[ ].txt"
$ scp SERVER:test\\\[\\\ \\\].txt DESTINATION

If you want a comformatable way, try installing a shell like "zsh" and configure auto completion as this enables you to handle this in a very comfortable way. Feel free to ask in Launchpad Answers for this.

Best.