9 Cool SSH Tricks You May Not Know

If you are running a website, even if it is a blog, chances are, you might have used SSH at least once. SSH stands for Secure SHell. When you use SSH, the communication and data transfer between the local machine and the remote machine occurs in a secure encrypted tunnel. So no one will be able to snoop on your data.

SSH is quite useful to system administrators and webmasters alike.

For instance, to speedily copy a whole directory to a remote host you can use the following command :

$ tar cf . | ssh remotehost "cd /tmp/dir ; tar xf -"

What this command does is it first creates an archive of all the files and directories in the current folder and then sends it via SSH to the machine named "remotehost". There it unpacks the contents of the archive in the /tmp/dir directory.

Today I came across a nice article that explains a couple of SSH tricks that not many people may know.

This includes fancy uses like mounting files located on a remote system over SSH, and using a key based cryptography system instead of passwords for authentication.

Read the full list of 9 cool SSH tricks @ tychoish.com.