Command line file transfer using sshfs

(**Old post alert** This is an old post I dug up from sometime around college)

I’ve gotten really used to using bash now, so it’s always a drag when I want to upload a file using sftp and lose my aliases, tab completion and everything else from my .bashrc. It’s also more of a pain to copy directories.

I know there are a couple of replacements for the default sftp client, and up until now, I had only tried lftp briefly. It was better,but not quite what I was looking for, and I found a bit awkward to use. Although that part could just be my own inexperience with it.

Anyway, I just stumbled upon a solution to my problem that is dead simple and ALSO lets me get all the power and ease of use my personalized bash environment. Double win! It’s called sshfs (SSH FileSystem), it’s in the Debian and Ubuntu package repos already, and I doubtless should have found it a long time ago. It lets you mount a directory on your remote machine using ssh. Magical!

In case you need it, here’s a quick runthrough of what you need to get this working:

sudo aptitude install sshfs
sshfs user@host: localmountpoint

It defaults to your home directory as the point to mount, but if you want to you can specify a location after ‘host:’ like so:

sshfs user@host:/home/user/data/ localmountpoint

When you’re done, you can unmount it with this command:

fusermount -u localmountpoint

If it a location that you use frequently like me, you could put an alias in your .bash_aliases file so mounting is a single ‘mount_server’ command, and unmounting is ‘unmount_server’. Now when I want to upload something it’s as painless as using cp or mv!