If you use SSH from the command line you can save yourself some typing by aliasing the servers hostname to something shorter. There’s a bunch of different ways to get similar results, but I prefer to use the built in SSH functionality for this. Create a ~/.ssh/config file. The syntax is:

Host server
HostName server.example.com
User username
 
Host another
HostName another.example.com
User username

Now you can just ssh server instead of ssh username@example.server.com. SCP also works great with these aliases, just scp file.txt server:/path

You can leave the User part out of the config file if your local and remote usernames are the same.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Linux, System Administration.