Several other clients are included in addition to ssh and scp :
The scp command is convenient and useful, but many users are already familiar with FTP (File Transfer Protocol), a more widely used technique for transferring files on the Internet.[10] sftp is a separate file-transfer tool layered on top of SSH. The OpenSSH sftp can run over either SSH-1 or SSH-2, whereas the Tectia version runs over SSH-2 only due to implementation details.
sftp has several advantages:
It is secure, using an SSH-protected channel for data transfer.
Multiple commands for file copying and manipulation can be invoked within a single sftp session, whereas scp opens a new session each time it is invoked.
It can be scripted using the familiar ftp command language.
In other software applications that run an FTP client in the background, you can try substituting sftp, thus securing the file transfers of that application. You might need to run an agent, however, since programs that normally invoke ftp might not recognize the sftp passphrase prompt, or they might expect you to have suppressed FTP's password prompt (using a .netrc file, for example).
Anyone familiar with FTP will feel right at home with sftp, but sftp has some additional features of note:
Command-line editing using GNU Emacs-like keystrokes
(Control-B for backward
character, Control-E for end of
line, and so forth).[11]
Wildcards for matching filenames. OpenSSH uses the same "globbing" syntax that is supported by most common shells, while Tectia uses an extended regular expression syntax described in Appendix B.
Read commands from the given file instead of the terminal.
Locate the ssh program using the given path.
Print verbose messages as the program runs.
Print the program version number and exit.
In addition, many of the command-line options for ssh can also be used for sftp.
The OpenSSH version of sftp supports only the binary transfer mode of standard FTP, in which files are transferred without modification. Tectia's sftp also supports ASCII transfer mode, which translates end-of-line characters between systems that might use different conventions, e.g., carriage return plus newline for Windows, newline (only) for Unix, or carriage return (only) for Macintosh.
slogin is an alternative name for ssh, just as rlogin is a synonym for rsh. On Linux systems, slogin is simply a symbolic link to ssh. Note that the slogin link is found in OpenSSH but not Tectia. We recommend using just ssh for consistency: it's found in all these implementations and is shorter to type.