from the desk of stinkpot

command-line sftp client with auto-complete

October 3rd, 2006 by Lawrence David

sure sftp is more secure than ftp, but the default client has got some terrible usability problems.

for instance, it always really bugged me that i couldn’t tab-auto-complete in sftp.  it’s crazy!  how else do you enter long filenames?!

thankfully, i’ve finally found a command-line sftp client that does handle auto-completion: yafc (yet another ftp client).

clever names aside, i highly recommend installing this client – i finally feel like my command-line ftp is more user-friendly than some silly GUI.

to install in debian/ubutnu or on the mac (via fink):

sudo apt-get install yafc

Posted in Mac OS X, Unix | 4 Comments »

if that was helpful ...

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

4 Responses to “command-line sftp client with auto-complete”

1. on 19 Sep 2007 at 3:06 pm   Carlo Capocasa

   Saved my life! Thanks.

2. on 01 Oct 2007 at 2:21 pm   Eric Brunson

   My search for “sftp client completion” led me here. Thanks for the pointer, yafc is in the Fedora repos, so installing was a cinch. Knowing it existed was the trick.

3. on 17 Jan 2010 at 1:05 pm   Sam

   Found out about yafc from this post. Much more user friendly than sftp.

4. on 14 Mar 2010 at 7:48 pm   rex

   Hey guys,

   you can also use lftp

   apt-get install lftp

   you can then

   lftp sftp://