What is PuTTY?
PuTTY is a free and open source terminal application for Windows. It’s one of the most popular telnet apps for Windows operating systems.
It can do basic serial terminal communications between your system and different protocols; it is also able to perform secure file transfers via SFTP and SCP.
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Developers, system and server administrators and other IT professionals that need to remotely connect to different protocols will find PuTTY extremely useful.
This little software comes with amazing configuration options, ability to save connections and extremely fast speed and resource usage. It’s a must-have application for most users to connect servers remotely.
Windows don’t ship with the tools which enable you to do similar tasks, leaving PuTTY to nicely fill this gap.
This free Telnet and SSH client allow you to connect any remote machine and to use it in the simplest way possible from Windows OS. Despite its simplicity, it has much more options than other (even commercial) similar software.
Use of PuTTY
In a multi-user operating system like Unix, the interface is generally of command-line type, just like the command prompt or MS-DOS. As such the user needs to type in the command in the command line program to get anything processed by the system.
Generally, these commands can quickly be run over a network from a different computer on a different location (client) and the response is transferred over the network to the client.
The arrangement mentioned above is made possible with the help of network protocols like SSH, Telnet, Rlogin, etc. Interestingly, users can give commands to multiple computers simultaneously.
SSH (Secure Shell) protocol is a cryptographic network protocol that allows you to access an internet server while encrypting any information sent to that server.
Some of the other protocols include Telnet, Rlogin only if either you are connected to a Unix system or you have a login account on a web server (a shell account). PuTTY is one such application that enables this kind of transfer.
Conclusion
PuTTY is a free, highly configurable and open-source SSH client which makes it convenient to connect to a remote server and transfer files over the network. Mainly aimed for the use of programmers and network administrator, it helps establish secure connections when transferring data over the network.