Accessing remote files¶

Accessing from university’s computers¶

If you are working on one of the university’s computer, you can copy small files back and forth seamlessly: your university files will be in a special location called $BUCSHOME (this time, the $ belongs to the name and must be typed: there is no space between it and the rest of the name).

For instance, the following should list the files you currently store on your university computer My documents folder:

$ ls $BUCSHOME/dos

You can copy things back and forth using cp:

$ nano test.txt

Type in something like: This is from Balena, save and copy the file over to your H drive:

$ cp test.txt $BUCSHOME/dos/

Then have a look at your document folder: a new file called test.txt should have appeared. Open it with Notepad and replace Balena with Windows and save. Then type:

$ cp $BUCSHOME/dos/test.txt test.txt
$ less test.txt
This is from Windows

Accessing files from Windows/MacOS¶

If you are using MobaXterm as described in How do you access Balena?, you should be able to drag and drop files directly within that application.

On the university computers, you can use FileZilla instead: there is a portable version distributed as a .zip file. Once launched set the Host to balena.bath.ac.uk, type your user name and password and put 22 as Port. The files on Balena should be displayed on the right pane.

Accessing files from Linux¶

Under Linux, you can use your native file browser to access your files on Balena just as if they were on you computer. Be sure to have gvfs installed. Open Nautilus for instance. Press Ctrl-l and type sftp://<username>@balena.bath.ac.uk. Press Enter. You should now be able to access files on Balena just as if they were on you computer. You can bookmark the location and save your password for future use.

Accessing files from the command line¶

Linux and MacOS users can use sftp or scp to pass files around:

[mycomputer ~]$ ssh <username>@balena.bath.ac.uk
[balena-01 ~]$ echo "This is from Balena" > test.txt
[balena-01 ~]$ exit
logout
[mycomputer ~]$ sftp <username>@balena.bath.ac.uk:test.txt text.txt
[mycomputer ~]$ cat text.txt
This is from Balena

As described here, those commands are rather cumbersome to use though they should work as long as OpenSSH is there.