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I love WinSCP for Windows. What is the best equivalent software for Linux?

I tried to use sshfs to mount the remote file system on my local machine, but it is not as user friendly as simply launching a GUI, plus it seems to require root access on the client machine, which is not very convenient.

Of course command-line tools such as scp are possible, but I am looking for a simple GUI.

Peter Mortensen
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MiniQuark
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    sshfs does not require root on any machine. – ypnos Nov 18 '08 at 17:27
  • - sshfs requires a user who has permissions to whatever file/folder you need access to on the remote machine. - you can also script the sshfs connection string into a shell script and just execute it whenever you want, instead of retyping. - Ubuntu supports bookmarks for connections in Nautilus – Adam Nov 18 '08 at 17:38
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    Instead of closing this topic as off-topic why it was not moved to SuperUser? Was SuperUser available in 2008? Off-topic is simply wrong ... what's the use of WinSCP? Programming? Nah ... probably cooking! – StefanNch Sep 27 '15 at 14:06
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    I assume somebody has told you that "winscp" is the _windows_ equivalent of `scp`, right? – ThorSummoner Jul 18 '17 at 21:07
  • FAR Manager https://github.com/elfmz/far2l is a good option – Sergey Ponomarev Nov 30 '20 at 08:38
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    The votes that this question keeps on getting – from the community – clearly show that the moderators were and are dead-wrong in closing it. Their view is not representative of the community at all. – pglpm Oct 08 '22 at 12:01
  • I think this question would be more fitting in the super user stack exchange (https://superuser.com/). That's probably why it was closed by a moderator. – Thomas Fritz Dec 10 '22 at 22:22
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    There's a ton of questions like this with hundreds of upvotes which were *unhelpfully* closed by people for no good reason. I wish they'd either just 1) Ignore them (are these REALLY hurting anything? nope) or 2) Migrate the things to another subsite which is "appropriate" (in the mods/admins extremely subjective and probably minority opinion) – Manius May 21 '23 at 05:09

15 Answers15

247

If you're using GNOME, you can go to: Places → Connect to Server in Nautilus and choose SSH. If you have an SSH agent running and configured, no password will be asked! (This is the same as sftp://root@servername/directory in Nautilus)

In Konqueror, you can simply type: fish://servername.

Per Mike R: In Ubuntu 14.04 (with Unity) it’s under Files → Connect to Server in the menu or Network → Connect to Server in the sidebar.

Peter Mortensen
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Bash
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    Thanks for simplicity. Didn't know Nautilus can do this. – azec-pdx Apr 10 '12 at 08:27
  • @MiniQuark: maybe you should change it to accepted answer if it is closer to what you asked – Răzvan Flavius Panda Jan 20 '13 at 07:32
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    great answer Bash, thank you. FYI, fish://servername also works in Dolphin. – mike May 20 '13 at 23:37
  • A side note: Gnome uses GVFS, which (at least here on Debian) by default mounts servers somewhere under ~/.gvfs. That may be extremely annoying, e.g. when you later try to traverse your ~ using `find`. Solution: add `export GVFS_DISABLE_FUSE=1` to your .bashrc or .profile – Alois Mahdal Jul 17 '13 at 16:33
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    You can try PCManFM (`apt-get install pcmanfm`), just another File Manager like Nautilus and Thunar, but I find it better. In the main menu just click Go --> Connect to server... and you get a GUI for connections, plus you can bookmark them, and what I find best is that you can just right click on files and use "open with.." and use your favorite programs, just like your local files! – aesede Sep 22 '14 at 19:51
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    In Ubuntu 14.0.4 its under `Files > Connect to Server` in the Menu or `Network > Connect to Server` in the sidebar – Mike R Apr 08 '16 at 02:06
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    Example of what to input in `Connect to server`: `ssh://user@servername`, as of Ubuntu 16.04 (Nautilus 3.14.3). – Yamaneko Nov 29 '16 at 15:43
  • Sync folder is not avaylable in nautilus – Angel115 May 02 '17 at 14:56
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    It's `Other Locations` instead of `Places` in Ubuntu 18.04 default file browser, otherwise it worked perfectly! – Dan M. Jan 31 '19 at 13:50
  • For who uses another port instead port 22 to SSH service just put the current port after host ip, separated by colon: fish://root@172.17.1.8:3333. – Leandro Arruda Sep 04 '19 at 18:28
  • Also if you connect with this approach you can use for example Double Commander (same functionality as WinSCP for me) – Pauli Sep 07 '20 at 07:26
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    This works using ssh:// in Ubuntu 20.04 as well. – Harlin Nov 21 '20 at 15:46
70

FileZilla is available for Linux. If you are using Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install filezilla

Otherwise, you can download it from the FileZilla website.

Peter Mortensen
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William Brendel
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    filezilla can´t copy files over ssh (that's whats scp is for) – The Disintegrator Oct 14 '13 at 04:05
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    Filezilla supports SFTP, which provides many additional management capabilities compared to the older SCP protocol. It is also widely supported on virtually every OS. Also, since the OP mentioned SSHFS in his question, it's clear his environment supports SFTP. One small note: the SCP protocol is faster than SFTP, but SFTP is better in almost every other respect. – William Brendel Oct 15 '13 at 22:15
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    Agreed Filezilla and STFP are great, but they don't suppress the need of SCP in many cases. So you didn't answer the question. In the client side you can't change the fact you only have SSH available. Not everybody is root of every server. – Diego Duarte Jan 04 '16 at 20:44
  • Filezilla + SFTP offers processor-bottlenecked transfer speed. – Lonnie Best Aug 23 '16 at 10:50
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    fileZilla no SCP support, full stop. – zhuhang.jasper Jul 31 '19 at 05:54
  • Can I create desktop entry to access server files – Muhammed Ozdogan Apr 19 '21 at 13:00
64

I use FileZilla and it works fine with SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol). Follow these steps to install it and configure it:

1. Install FileZilla via terminal:

sudo apt-get install filezilla

2. Open the program and go to menu File → Site Manager... or simply type Ctrl + S

3. The following window should appear: Enter image description here

4. Enter the name of your host, select the port (usually 22 for ssh/scp/sftp) and choose SFTP - SSH File Transfer Protocol as the protocol and optionally set the Logon Type to Normal if authentication is needed, then enter your data.

Ivaylo Toskov
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    This is not really great: I'm running FileZilla 3.5.0 and it can't use my private key (`.ssh/id_rsa`) to log in to the server. Which is unfortunate, because I even don't know the password to this server (for security reasons), I only have a collection of `authorized_keys`. KDE's `fish://` can do the trick. BTW, thanks for the keyboard shortcut - I was only using "quick connect" before. – Tomasz Gandor Jun 23 '14 at 14:56
  • This did the trick for me! Needed secure access, and had filezilla already installed! – Dustin Cook May 06 '15 at 10:43
  • "Connect to Server" in nautilus is almost enough for me in development, but FileZilla is a great complement in some circumstance. – Eric Zheng Jan 02 '17 at 03:47
  • What is *"resp."*? *"respectively"*? Or something else? – Peter Mortensen Nov 03 '21 at 01:38
  • @PeterMortensen this answer was written many years ago when my English was noticeably worse. I replaced _"resp."_ with _"then"_, since it seems to make the most sense. – Ivaylo Toskov Nov 03 '21 at 10:42
  • I was about to install FileZilla on Ubuntu server and was informed `After this operation, 410 MB of additional disk space will be used.` – Lord Loh. Jun 15 '22 at 22:55
27

A Xfce/Thunar solution is basically the same as GNOME/Nautilus:

Simply type sftp://yourhost/ in the address line in Thunar (you can get there by Ctrl + L).

(The authorization is identical to ssh/scp, i.e. with proper use of file ~/.ssh/config, keys and ssh-agent, you can achieve decent ease and security: server alias + no passwords asked.)

Peter Mortensen
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Alois Mahdal
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    This worked for me. But only after I cleared up a warning from an old entry in the known_hosts file. Prior to that Thunar just timed out when trying to log in without any details as to why. So make sure you can ssh in cleanly without warnings first. – Greg Chabala Jun 26 '16 at 23:07
  • If you use keys the in a terminal run ssh-add ~/Path/to/your/key then try connecting . – LUser Feb 02 '19 at 11:36
24

To run WinSCP under Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)), follow these steps:

  1. Run sudo apt-get install wine (run this one time only, to get 'wine' in your system, if you don’t have it)
  2. Download the latest WinSCP portable package https://winscp.net/eng/download.php
  3. Make a folder and put the content of the ZIP file in this folder
  4. Open a terminal
  5. Type wine WinSCP.exe

Done! WinSCP will run like in a Windows environment!

Peter Mortensen
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NABA
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  • @TomaszGandor, First I thought root is needed for installing dependencies which are necessary. But even after all dependencies are installed, root is needed to run WinSCP. – djhurio Mar 01 '18 at 19:34
  • At the first glance it seems to be working just fine as a regular user. Maybe a new change? I'm running Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon; the terminal shows a handful of error at startup but WinSCP seems to be running fine. Tried connecting to a server and downloading a file to my home folder. – LuH Oct 14 '19 at 14:16
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    One step is missing, at least in my case. I had to install WinSCP first after downloading it to my Downloads folder by typing `wine Z:/home//Downloads/WinSCP.exe`. WinSCP was the only program that worked for me connecting to a Morty ssh server. – Günter Dec 22 '19 at 18:26
19
  1. gFTP
  2. Konqueror's fish kio-slave (just write as file path: ssh://user@server/path
Peter Mortensen
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Sunny Milenov
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    konqueror has supported this for a long while - at least since 2003 as evidenced by this old mailing list post (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2003-September/017809.html) :) – warren Nov 18 '08 at 17:21
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    that feature of Konqueror is super useful. I use it a lot. – rmeador Nov 18 '08 at 18:50
14

WinSCP works fine on Linux under Wine. I installed Wine and WinSCP and had no problems.

Peter Mortensen
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Morgan van Dyk
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13

I've used gFTP for that.

ayaz
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6

Use FireFTP, Krusader, and other similar applications.

Peter Mortensen
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Jenish
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5

Nautilus can be used easily in this case.

For Fedora 16, go to menu File → Connect To Server, select the appropriate protocol, enter required details and simply connect. Just make sure that the SSH server is running on the other side. It works great.

This is valid on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) as well.

Peter Mortensen
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Saurabh Araiyer
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5

One thing I find WinSCP does well that I cannot do easily with Ubuntu tools is tunneling to a secondary machine. This is done with one with one connection setting in WinSCP. While I can use the native file browsers in Ubuntu (11.11) to reach any machine, I cannot easily tunnel thru an intermediate machine to reach a third one. I suspect it is because I do not well understand how to set up tunneling. I am toying with gSTM, but there is little documentation, and I suspect it is for setting up local tunnels, not remote ones. In any case it is not as dead simple as WinSCP made it. This is no anwser, but perhaps it highlights a critical feature of WinSCP that suggestions for alternatives should address.

Now off to learn more about tunneling...

Troy Hester
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Use Nautilus, the default file manager in GNOME. Here is how you may - Best SCP GUI on Linux.

Peter Mortensen
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Robin
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    Welcome to Stack Overflow! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, [it would be preferable](http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/8259) to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference. – Taryn Sep 17 '12 at 11:52
3

One big thing not mentioned is the fact that with WinSCP you can also use key file authentication which I am unable to do successfully with Ubuntu FTP clients. KFTPGrabber is the closest thing I can find that supports key file authentication... but it still doesn't work for me, where WinSCP does.

Paul G
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2

If you're using Xfce (or LXDE) instead of GNOME, there's an equivalent tool: Gigolo.

I suppose, but not sure, it can be installed also on other desktop environments.

It supports FTP, SSH and WebDAV and it is quite intuitive to use: just click on Connect, choose the protocol, fill the parameters and go. You can save the connections for later use.

Peter Mortensen
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Marco
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1

Just use GNOME. Just type in the address and away you go!

Peter Mortensen
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Karl
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