Stupid SSH Tricks: A Better Hosts File

Paul — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:00:15 +0000

I’ve been noodling with SSH to make my life easier at work. One thing I found out about was how to make host aliases in your SSH config file. (It’s usually located at ~/.ssh/config). And it’s pretty easy to do. Here’s an example:

Host webhost
   User host_user
   HostName example.com
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/some_id_dsa

The reason this is better than your hosts file (/private/etc/hosts) is because you can do things like scp ~/somefile.txt webhost:~/upload.txt and scp, since it uses ssh, will realize you want to do this: scp -i ~/.ssh/some_id_dsa ~/somefile.txt host_user@example.com:~/upload.txt

If you do a lot of sshing and scping like I do, you’ll find this extremely convenient. And if you use ssh keys, it makes working on multiple machines as easy as working on a local machine.

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Stupid SSH Tricks: A Better Hosts File