Software to Install on Personal Computers – For Mac Users!

It turns out there are some pros and cons to running on Macs for doing these activities.  Here are some updates on how to efficiently work on a mac:

• You don’t need Cygwin at all since X11/XWindow is included in the operating system already!
• You don’t need something like WinSCP, since you can use SFTP to transfer files from a local computer to the remote computer.  Here’s how:
  1. Open a terminal window on your local computer.
  2. Use cd and ls to get to the local directory on your hard drive where you have files you want to send to the remote computer.
  3. Type sftp user@host to connect to the remote computer.  Enter your password.
  4. Use cd and ls to get to the directory on the remote system where you want to put the files from your local system.
  5. Type put filename to transfer a file to the remote system. You can also use mput *abc to transfer multiple files (in this example, everything ending in abc). The asterisk is a wildcard; it matches any character, any number of times.
• If you want to transfer in the other direction, i.e. from the remote machine to the local machine, use the get and mget commands, which work just like put and mput.
• Summary of useful sftpcommands:
  • get filename Copy a file from the remote computer to the local computer.
  • mget filenames Copy several files from the remote computer to the local computer. Can use wildcards.
  • put filename Copy a file from the local computer to the remote computer.  Use -r if you want to upload a whole directory.  Note that the command can’t create a directory that already exists, so when you’re on the remote computer, use mkdir to make a new directory that matches the one you want to copy first.
  • mput filenames Copy several files from the local computer to the remote computer. Can use wildcards.
  • cd path Change directories on the remote computer.
  • ls List the files in the current directory on the remote computer.
  • pwd Display the path of the current directory on the remote computer.
  • lpwd Display the path of the current directory on the local computer.
  • lcd Change directories on the local computer.

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