# Graphical file management tool for remote servers?

## freedomlives

I am using XFCE and so I have my two servers as SFTP mounts through Thunar file manager, which is great for transferring files to/from my desktop to server.  But I've realized that SFTP doesn't have a remote copy command.  So any moves or copies I do through Thunar or any other file manager integrated with SFTP end up downloading the file to my local machine and then re-uploading it to the remote machine-- which can be quite slow.

Obviously, I know the command line and how to use SSH, just I find graphical utilities simpler for many operations.

So I wonder (and haven't found through googling) whether there is no sort of graphical client that connects using SSH to a remote host and uses shell commands on the remote host to perform file operations (e.g. cp, mv, etc.) and SFTP to send files between local host and remote?

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## Fulgurance

I'm not expert on networking, but i think Filezilla it's good for your problem.

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/net-ftp/filezilla

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## John R. Graham

I think you're working too hard to try to find tools to do a job in a nonstandard way. If you use NFS (or Samba) to mount the remote filesystems locally, then any tool that can manipulate a file can do the job, right down to the command line usual suspects (cp, mv, rm, cat, etc.) and all the way up to the complex GUI file managers.

- John

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## freedomlives

I guess I have to take my setup to the "next level" then.  I've been happy mostly with SFTP as it is trivial to get working in a secure fashion.  Granted that I'm the only one with shell-level access to these servers, so I won't have to deal with complexities of multi-user access over NFS or Samba, just to make sure that the stream is encrypted and only I have access.  Would tunneling either of these over SSH be the solution?

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## cboldt

Haven't tried it, Firefox has an addon called FireFTP

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## nbrogan

Have you considered using a command line file manager with a TUI, like ranger or midnight commander? If you ssh-ed into your server and installed one of these, you could manage local files graphically (I personally use Ranger for almost everything file related) right in your ssh session.

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