PuTTY bug win-plink-stdin-eof

summary: Plink reports an error when it gets EOF from standard input
class: bug: This is clearly an actual problem we want fixed.
priority: high: This should be fixed in the next release.
absent-in: 0.58
present-in: 0.59
fixed-in: r7415 2007-03-28 (0.60) (0.61) (0.62)

From a report received (42994.55835.qm@web56205.mail.re3.yahoo.com):

The following command is designed to pipe through a remote command back to  
the local host and demonstrates an issue found while using mercurial.  I  
have looked through your existing bug list but failed to spot anything  
similar.

dir | PLINK.EXE -v -ssh -l duncan -i "C:\Program Files\PuTTY\hugo.ppk"  
remote_host cat > tmp

fails on 0.59 and 2007-03-21:r7403.  works on 0.58.

localhost : Win XP home edition SP2 all updates applied
remote: suse linux 10.2 : SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.4


dir | "c:\Program Files\Putty\PLINK.EXE" -v -ssh -l duncan -i "C:\Program  
Files\PuTTY\hugo.ppk" cyclops cat > tmp

Looking up host "cyclops"
Connecting to 192.168.0.101 port 22
Server version: SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.4
We claim version: SSH-2.0-PuTTY_Snapshot_2007_03_21:r7403
Using SSH protocol version 2
Doing Diffie-Hellman group exchange
Doing Diffie-Hellman key exchange with hash SHA-256
Host key fingerprint is:
ssh-rsa 1024 18:d1:50:e9:e4:79:83:f5:42:6a:eb:52:5e:9b:06:dc
Initialised AES-256 SDCTR client->server encryption
Initialised HMAC-SHA1 client->server MAC algorithm
Initialised AES-256 SDCTR server->client encryption
Initialised HMAC-SHA1 server->client MAC algorithm
Reading private key file "C:\Program Files\PuTTY\hugo.ppk"
Using username "duncan".
Offered public key
Offer of public key accepted
Authenticating with public key "imported-openssh-key"
Access granted
Opened channel for session
Started a shell/command
Unable to read from standard input

This particular instance of "Unable to read from standard input" should be fixed now:

> Does that fix the "Unable to read from standard input" bug?

The answer, currently, is `I don't know'. It certainly fixes _a_ bug which
gives rise to that error message: if you do something along the lines of

  echo -e 'wibble\nscrark' | plink foovax sort

then you should now no longer get that error.

However, I can't be sure that the same error when doing complicated things
launched from a service is due to the same Windows error, so it might not fix
all instances of the problem. This is why I also added more detailed error
reporting to that error message, so that if any instances of the problem remain
we'll have more information with which to investigate them.

It turns out there are more instances of this; see win-plink-stdin-handle-invalid.

Audit trail for this bug.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2008-02-23 17:30:10 +0000)