I'm thiking about creating UNIX accounts merely for students to upload
their homework through scp. But I have not solved all what I want to
solve. (Such students are expected to be technical enough to use scp.)

I'm thinking of scp because it's solid enough. It's simple. It works.
I end up having all of the work centralized in a UNIX system. I get
dates et cetera.

But what'd really like is to have a program receive each file transfer
and rename the file, say. In other words, I'd like to associate an scp
transfer to a script, much like e-mail can invoke a script on a UNIX
system.

Maybe SSH can sort of do this. I'll look into the documentation. Any
ideas? Thank you!

(*) My thought process leading up to this

Solution 1. Students could send me e-mails, but I have the massive work
of pulling files from my inbox into a UNIX system where I can look at
each one. E-mail does the job because it /sort of/ proves the delivery.

Solution 2. They could scp files, but this lets them overwrite files.
It'd be nice if each upload would turn the submission into a
next-version.

Meredith Montgomery <mmontgomery@levado.to> writes:
> I'm thiking about creating UNIX accounts merely for students to upload
> their homework through scp. But I have not solved all what I want to
> solve. (Such students are expected to be technical enough to use scp.)

[...]

> But what'd really like is to have a program receive each file transfer
> and rename the file, say. In other words, I'd like to associate an scp
> transfer to a script, much like e-mail can invoke a script on a UNIX
> system.

[...]

> Solution 1. Students could send me e-mails, but I have the massive work
> of pulling files from my inbox into a UNIX system where I can look at
> each one. E-mail does the job because it /sort of/ proves the delivery.

If you can arrange for e-mails to be delivered to the UNIX system, you
can process them automatically, ie, with a script there. The obvious
traditional suggestion for this would be procmail.