Downloading files remotely using PuTTY

Recently at work I found myself in a situation where I needed a file from my home server and I had just replaced my work laptop and still didn't have a linux installation available. After doing a bit of searching I found out that I can use PuTTY under windows to directly download this file through an SSH tunnel. Here is how you can do that.

Open the windows command prompt by typing "run" in the search box and pressing enter.

Once you have the terminal open find the path to the folder where putty is located, on my windows 7 install that equates to C:/Program Files x86\Putty

from there just make sure you have the file pspc.exe available (if you don't know, the command "dir" shows files , but I'm assuming if you know how to use PuTTY you also know how to navigate windows using the terminal.

Run pscp by typing the command

pscp.exe 

now enter the command

pscp.exe username@x.x.x.x:/file_path/filename c:\directory\filename

where username pertains to your credentials to log into the server via SSH remotely. x.x.x.x is obviously the ip address of the server you are trying to download the file from. The first path pertains to the path of the file you want to retrieve (yes you have to know this in advance, if you don't just SSH normally and figure it out first). Then the last path is the path of where you want you new file to be downloaded into.

I hope this is helpful for when you can't just use sshfs under linux. If you don't know what SSHFS is look it up, it's basically an SSH method of mounting a samba directory remotely. I may post more on that at some point.