Handy Guide to PuTTY : The SSH/Telnet Client For Windows

Handy Guide to PuTTY provides the easy and best all in one Guide for using PuTTY including usages needed for Newer Windows Operating System with Cloud Servers. If you are a novice Handy Guide to PuTTY is suitable for you and even if you think yourself an expert or really expert, still this Handy Guide to PuTTY will give you some extra edges.

Handy Guide to PuTTY :  What is PuTTY ?

PuTTY is a client software for SSH, Telnet, rlogin and raw TCP and is free, comes with MIT license. Originally PuTTY was available only for Windows, is now available on several platforms, sometimes combined with SFTP softwares like WinSCP.

This is only a Handy Guide to PuTTY, it is not about history, development of PuTTY. If you want to read SSH, FTP etc. you can read these topics :

• Secure Shell or SSH 
• Differences between FTP and SSH

Handy Guide to PuTTY

PuTTY can be downloaded from this URL :

Download the putty.exe version, not the zip. This putty.exe is a handy tool that does not require to be installed :

This is most common wrong injected by others – there is no need to to download the installer version. That is risky because Windows is well known for malwares and installing increases the risk than a portable software plus you can actually carry it on your USB drive. You will just get a shortcut icon like software, just double clicking will evoke this window :

Just paste the IP and click  Open button. There is no need to change any settings. Do not save any password, any session. That is quite risky on Windows.

And this black screen will come :

Login as usually root. The password is provided by the service provider. For Rackspace you will get it while building the server. Usually a security prompt comes to save the keys on your computer, always click yes.

Basic Key functions  are :

All normal text you can type like on notepad, hitting the Enter key, executes the command on the server. You can easily type yourself from a guide a short command like :

But it is not practical to type a big command like :

Usually the guides uses HTML < pre > like above, so you can copy by highlighting with mouse (click and dragging over the commands on the guide) and either copy using CTRL + C or by right click. On the Window of PuTTY, simple right click pastes the text. (For git bash you will need to use Insert key for this function).

The last only thing practically you need to know is using a text editor in PuTTY. I like to use nano. nano has the advantage that it is usually get installed as a package on all usually used Linux OS.  For example, if i want to Edit sources.list with nano I will use this :

Now the screen will become confusing if you are a new user :

You will see a guide like text is below saying ^G Help like things. Control key is referred to using ^ in nano. That means :

If you hit CTRL and X keys, what ever you did the change, will be saved with a prompt, just use the the arrow keys and select yes or no and you will get in to command mode again. Usually we use PuTTY to install server softwares and SFTP or FTP is available. There is no need to have the pain to edit pure HTML or PHP files on PuTTY. Simply Open it with WinSCP and you can visually edit it like normally you do. This Handy Guide to PuTTY shows basically the normally needed functions and covers almost all the needs at least for Rackspace Cloud, Amazon and Media Template and few others. In other words, there is no need to do a research on PuTTY for just using it for setting up a server or installing a software. This is the reason this is named as Handy Guide to PuTTY. It is the minimum and maximum you will need to know under normal usages.