A number of free and commercial ssh clients are available for just about every major operating system. Below is a listing of some of the more popular packages:

Unix/Linux SSH Clients

• OpenSSH - This is a free, open-source SSH package including ssh, scp, and sftp. This is the recommended package for all Linux and Unix distributions and is installed by default on many Linux distributions.
• SSH Communications Security - This is a commercial product available for Linux and a variety of Unix platforms.

Windows SSH Clients

• PuTTY is the IU-recommended Windows ssh client and is widely used. One big advantage of putty is that you can fit putty.exe on a CD or floppy disk and run it from any computer with a CD-ROM or floppy drive. It can be run from the CD or floppy without having to install it on the system so it is ideal for things like cyber cafes or library machines where installing software is not an option. The PSCP and PSFTP clients for secure file copy and secure ftp are also available.
• WinSCP is a very nice free graphical file transfer client using the SSH protocol. This is the IU-recommended file transfer client.
• SSH Communications Security - This is a commercial product available for Windows as well as several other platforms.

Mac SSH Clients

• Mac OS X comes with SSH support built in so no additional software is needed.
• MacSSH is a free ssh client for MacOS 9.x.

[Return to the FAQ index]