Although it's relatively simple, I thought I'd write a brief article on the use of sshfs, because it's such a helpful tool. First, you'll need to have sshfs and fuse installed. You can get them here(sshfs) and here(fuse). The server (remote) side doesn't need anything but sshd (ssh server) installed. The beauty of the whole arrangement is that sshfs is really just a kind of wrapper around ssh/sftp, so the server doesn't even need to know about any permissions other than the standard ssh login. You can mount any path from the server that you have access to via ssh. Using sshfs from the command line is really easy. To mount a filesystem, you'll want to do so as your standard user (not root). Simply do:

sshfs user@host: <mountpoint>

and to unmount:

fusermount -u <mountpoint>

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: April 2008
Index  

NAME

SSHFS - filesystem client based on ssh  

SYNOPSIS

mounting

sshfs [user@]host:[dir] mountpoint [options]

unmounting

fusermount -u mountpoint

DESCRIPTION

SSHFS (Secure SHell FileSystem) is a file system for Linux (and other operating systems with a FUSE implementation, such as Mac OS X or FreeBSD) capable of operating on files on a remote computer using just a secure shell login on the remote computer. On the local computer where the SSHFS is mounted, the implementation makes use of the FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) kernel module. The practical effect of this is that the end user can seamlessly interact with remote files being securely served over SSH just as if they were local files on his/her computer. On the remote computer the SFTP subsystem of SSH is used.