Nautilus and SSH

Chris Tyler's Blog

Nautilus and SSH Thu, May 18. 2006

Here's a little-known capability of Nautlius (the Gnome file manager): it can use SSH to browse remote folders.

To try this, open a Nautilus file browsing window (perhaps by clicking on your home directory icon on the desktop, or by using the Places menu, and then hit Ctrl-L (for Location). Type in a URI of the form ssh://user:password@host/directory -- for example, to go to my account at my office I could use ssh://chris@myoffice/. You can leave the password out (as I have done in this example) and have the system prompt you for it. The remote directory will be displayed, and then you can drag-and-drop files to copy them to/from the remote system.

If you double-click on a file, Nautilus will try to launch the appropriate application, but most applications don't know how to deal with ssh URIs. However, OpenOffice.org does -- so you can double-click on a remote spreadsheet and it will open locally. Since SSH is set up by default in most Linux distributions, and since it's fairly secure, this is a convenient and safe way to access remote files.
Posted by Chris Tyler in Computing Comments: (5) Trackbacks: (0)

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#1 - srivatsark 2006-10-25 07:22 - (Reply)

really a good tip. thanks

#2 - peridot 2006-10-28 16:22 - (Reply)

This is occasionally handy, but the fact that most applications don't support it is a pain. A nice alternative is SSHFS (it requires the FUSE kernel module, but that is distributed with many distributions these days). Any user can mount the contents of an sftp server on a directory in their home directory. It works well enough to watch divx movies over my wireless network (though it's a little too slow for DVD rips in vlc).

#3 - tts 2007-03-28 16:25 - (Reply)

This didnt work for me ,some thing about my password yet every thing works on the terminal ?

#3.1 - Chris Tyler 2007-03-28 16:34 - (Reply)

Interesting. I haven't had problems with Nautilus but I have with other clients (such as the iExplorer GUI shell for putty) when there's been spaces or punctuation in my password (?).

#4 - Brett 2007-06-20 14:33 - (Reply)

Nautilus isn't too friendly in Ubuntu:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/29391
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/41944
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/120220


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