(Not a subscriber, please CC me into relevant discussion only) I'm not sure if it's fixable, but this error message from scp in OpenSSH seems to be at least irrelevant, if not completely misleading... prompt> scp remote.example.com:/non-existent/directory/*glob* . select: Bad file descriptor server: OpenSSH openssh-server-2.1.1p1-1 client: OpenSSH openssh-2.1.1p1-1 When the same client is used with proprietary SSH 1.2.x provided by our local systems team, the error message is: scp: No match. Which is *much* more what I would expect. The error messages for a single missing file are OK, as are those for a directory-in-a-file-context, things which can't/shouldn't be copyable, and so on. If this is fixed in current CVS, please ignore, otherwise I hope someone can fix this for 2.1.2 or later. Thanks for your time, Nick.