The sshfs
utility is a FUSE (“Filesystem in Userspace”) program that allows you to mount a directory from a remote system locally, assuming you have ssh
access to the remote system. The command format is:
$ sshfs user@remote-system local-mountpoint options
There are lots of options, but the one that is almost always worth using is -C, which enables compression on the ssh
link.
Mounting
Here is it in action:
$ mkdir workpc $ sshfs kae@myworkpc.tiger-computing.co.uk: workpc -C
At this point, you can edit / copy / generally work on files under workpc
as if they were local files.
Unmounting
A minor gotcha is that simply using umount
won’t work:
$ umount workpc umount: workpc: Permission denied
Non-privileged users are not permitted to unmount filesystems by default. However, because sshfs
is a FUSE filesystem, we can unmount it with fusermount
:
$ fusermount -u workpc
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