Manual Pages  — SFTP-SERVER

Command-line flags to sftp-server should be specified in the Subsystem declaration. See sshd_config(5) for more information.

Valid options are:

-d start_directory
	Specifies an alternate starting directory for users. The pathname may contain the following tokens that are expanded at runtime: %% is replaced by a literal '%', %d is replaced by the home directory of the user being authenticated, and %u is replaced by the username of that user. The default is to use the user's home directory. This option is useful in conjunction with the sshd_config(5) ChrootDirectory option.
-e
	Causes sftp-server to print logging information to stderr instead of syslog for debugging.
-f log_facility
	Specifies the facility code that is used when logging messages from sftp-server. The possible values are: DAEMON, USER, AUTH, LOCAL0, LOCAL1, LOCAL2, LOCAL3, LOCAL4, LOCAL5, LOCAL6, LOCAL7. The default is AUTH.
-h
	Displays sftp-server usage information.
-l log_level
	Specifies which messages will be logged by sftp-server. The possible values are: QUIET, FATAL, ERROR, INFO, VERBOSE, DEBUG, DEBUG1, DEBUG2, and DEBUG3. INFO and VERBOSE log transactions that sftp-server performs on behalf of the client. DEBUG and DEBUG1 are equivalent. DEBUG2 and DEBUG3 each specify higher levels of debugging output. The default is ERROR.
-P denied_requests
	Specifies a comma-separated list of SFTP protocol requests that are banned by the server. sftp-server will reply to any denied request with a failure. The -Q flag can be used to determine the supported request types. If both denied and allowed lists are specified, then the denied list is applied before the allowed list.
-p allowed_requests
	Specifies a comma-separated list of SFTP protocol requests that are permitted by the server. All request types that are not on the allowed list will be logged and replied to with a failure message. Care must be taken when using this feature to ensure that requests made implicitly by SFTP clients are permitted.
-Q protocol_feature
	Queries protocol features supported by sftp-server. At present the only feature that may be queried is "requests", which may be used to deny or allow specific requests (flags -P and -p respectively).
-R
	Places this instance of sftp-server into a read-only mode. Attempts to open files for writing, as well as other operations that change the state of the filesystem, will be denied.
-u umask
	Sets an explicit umask(2) to be applied to newly-created files and directories, instead of the user's default mask.

On some systems, sftp-server must be able to access /dev/log for logging to work, and use of sftp-server in a chroot configuration therefore requires that syslogd(8) establish a logging socket inside the chroot directory.

T. Ylonen, S. Lehtinen, draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-02.txt, work in progress material, SSH File Transfer Protocol, October 2001.