Computer Science Department Unix Primer

Logging in via Secure Shell from Unix

Most modern Unix operating systems in production will already have secure shell clients installed. There has been an open-source version called OpenSSH available for a few years now (ever since the patents on the encryption method called RSA expired.) Most linux distributions and even Solaris 9 come with their own openssh packages.

It goes beyond the scope of this document to instruct how to install packages on a Unix system.

To log in remotely to another Unix machine, you must use the ssh command.

To copy files securely between machines, you must use the pscp command. Example:

Actually, pscp is more powerful than this simple example. Like the cp command in the File Commands section, the -r option can be used to copy directories recursively (which basically means that it copies files and directories in the directory, and files and directories in each subdirectory, and ... so on). pscp can also be used to copy files from a remote machine to the local machine, and to copy files between machines.