I’ve decided to do a few posts about some of the cool tools and tricks I use most in my day to day usage of Linux, and I’ll start with sshfs, the SSH filesystem.

As the name might suggest, sshfs allows you to mount all or part of a remote system’s filesystem with nothing more than an SSH connection. Here’s some examples of how to use it.

If you don’t already have it, you’ll need to grab the FUSE (user-space filesystem) library (this only needs to be installed on the client, it’s not needed on the remote box you want to mount).

Once FUSE and sshfs are installed, mounting is simple.

This example will mount your home directory on a remote system to ~/foo:


sshfs foo.example.com: ~/foo


If you want to map another part of the filesystem, give the path after the colon, like:


sshfs foo.example.com:/var/log ~/foo-log


If you need to use a different username when connecting to the remote system, you can give it like this:


sshfs bob@foo.example.com:/ ~/foo


(the single slash at the end of that last example will make it mount the entire filesystem of the remote box). Of course, if you need to use a different username, in the long run it’ll be quicker to edit ~/.ssh/config and add a host section for the remote machine specifying the username to use, like:


Host foo.example.com
User bob


Of course, as the connection goes over SSH, it’s all secure.

To unmount when you’re done, use the standard fusermount -u mountpoint.

Hope you find this useful – let me know in the comments!