Console Utility that can remote connect to other systems and issue commands

Question

Hi

Frequenlty my work involves to VNC to a remote system and work on it. SInce i run command line apps on this remote system most of the time, i was wondering if there's an alternative software to command prompt which i could install on my local machine. Using this i should be able to create a session with the remote system and from then on all commands issued in command prompt should run in remote system.

localHost>dir --> should list the directory contents in remotehost active directory

localhost>app.exe should run app.exe in remote host and display its contents in localhost command prompt

I browsed a little and read about cmdlets in powershell. But it looks like i need to write a cmdlet for each app in the path (dir, mkdir, app.exe in the path). Correct me if am wrong. Once session is established, i simply need the commands invoked in local host to be run in the remote host and return the console output to local host. Please let me know if powershell + cmdlets are the only way

THanks

Answer 1

SSH is what you're looking for. Cygwin has a SSH server and client.

Answer 2

Unix people do this all the time with SSH. You can install the sshd server on your remote machine through Cygwin, then use PuTTY to connect to it.

As a bonus, PuTTY does not use the clunky Windows cmd.exe program; it's got a much nicer terminal of its own.

You could maybe even run PowerShell on the remote end, so you don't have to learn bash.

Answer 3

Depending upon on how you actuall access the machines PSExec may be an alternative that wont require you to install anything on the remote system.

Answer 4

Just use PowerShell Remoting if it can be set up (requires a little preparation).

I'm not quite sure why you think of writing own cmdlets for stuff that's already there. dir is an alias to Get-ChildItem which does return the items in the current path (and—depending on options—some other stuff as well). And since PowerShell is a shell it has no problems running external programs too.