ssh - Alan's amusing and surprising homepage

SCP taming: stop local silliness

Every day now and then, I get an scp command wrong. Scp is designed after commands like rcp and works totally fine for local-to-local file copy. While this can (or could) be useful in some contexts, It's not what I like to do these

Mostly Unixish

SSH hostnames configuration and shortcuts

This is another old trick, but I like to tell the world about such amenities. I often find people writing command lines such as: ssh arcane-system-user@someextremelylong.andimpossibiletotype.anderrorprone.hostname.com or, worse ssh idliketorememberwhichuser@10.20.30.40 or maybe it was ssh

Mostly Unixish

ssh-copy-id with nonstandard sshd port

UPDATE: modern ssh-copy-id often support a -p parameter for the port. So this trick is unnecessary and won't probably work. ssh-copy-id is a cool script which is usually distributed along openssh client nowadays; it performs an automatic install of your local public SSH key

Mostly Unixish

ssh client: stopping key verification complaints inside your own private network

If you develop enough software, most probably you'll have a test/development network at your service. In such networks, which are usually handled through a virtualization infrastructure, machines come and go very quickly. But ssh clients are usually unhappy about that: alan@melquiades:/etc/

Mostly Unixish

Disown is your friend

Bash builtin disown is a not-so-well known [job control command] http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Job-Control-Builtins.html), and yet it's an extremely useful one. So what? You've started a remote ssh session, launched some command which is taking very, very