mtime.sec is not present

Question

I am facing a tricky situation here. I have a java based application that tries to scp remote machines to copy certain files. While performing those tasks , I am finding the below error message from the application side.

scp protocol error mtime.sec not present

But when I manually try to scp from the server to endpoint machine, I am able to do it without issues.

The command I am using for manual testing is scp localfile user@hostname:/tmp/

I am not sure of the error message mtime.sec is not present . Does anyone can throw some lights here. I couldn't find useful info from web, Any experts thoughts would help a lot.

As SCP is working normally using manual process, I am not sure there is something wrong with SCP.

I used `-vvvv` to find out. The real problem was `Too many logins`. The server accepted only two logins at a time. — toliveira, Jul 28 '20 at 15:25

score 38 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 13 '19 at 22:34

38

I've got the same issue. It worked for me if I scp to ubuntu 12.04. When I did that to ubuntu 14.04, it failed with same message.

I wrote the scp code based on this example http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/examples/ScpTo.java.html. I guess you too.

If I remove the whitespace after the "T" in the following line, it'll work. Change:

command="T "+(_lfile...

to

command="T"+(_lfile...

Either do that or set ptimestamp = false

edited Nov 13 '19 at 22:34

Roger Dueck

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answered May 10 '14 at 10:09

Bao Ho

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Yes , I agree... I too had to update the command and it worked , I missed to update the question here.. thanks for your input – skanagasabap May 12 '14 at 06:54
Yep, exactly same issue here with that example... Thank you for the solution! I'll try to notify the authors of that example somehow. – DragonGamer Sep 28 '17 at 03:43
how do i `set ptimestamp = false`, please? Tks in advance. – tony gil May 26 '18 at 11:56
inside file [ScpTo.java](http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/examples/ScpTo.java.html), around line 40, you will see how to use that flag – Bao Ho May 27 '18 at 03:03

score 9 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 14 '16 at 17:43

9

Like ZZapper above writes.

I ran into the same issue as above, trying to use scp to connect to a remote site and it also told me "protocol error: mtime.sec not delimited "

Running scp with -vvvv it turned out on the 'server side' they disallowed me to use scp and told me to use sftp instead.

edited Jul 14 '16 at 17:43

Jérémie B

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answered Jul 14 '16 at 14:38

Riccardo

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score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 11 '18 at 08:46

I learned my issue derived from the fact that our stftp server solely allows sftp connections. scp is not allowed.

debug2: channel_input_status_confirm: type 99 id 0
debug2: exec request accepted on channel 0
Sink: This service allows sftp connections only.
protocol error: mtime.sec not present

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 18 '15 at 10:16

protocol error: mtime.sec not delimited

I Googled this and learnt that this is a convoluted error message. We recently disabled our root login by making it 'nologin'. I forgot to update my scp script which was still trying to login as root. When I updated it use the new login all was fine. (sorry nothing to do with Java)

mtime.sec is not present

4 Answers4