[conspire] FileZilla isn't a file manager (but you can use it as one) (was: FTP)

[Nick Moffitt]

On 16Nov2020 11:28pm (+0000), paulz at ieee.org wrote:
> So, I will re-phrase my earlier question.  What are suggested tools to move
> files and/or whole trees between computers?   I like the Filezilla GUI.  Not
> all of my computers run Linux

I can't speak to Filezilla's GUI, having never used it.  FTP is so...80s!

Most bog-standard file managers on fully-featured GUI desktops these days will support sftp or some other filesystem management protocol over SSH.

For instance, if I fire up the GNOME file-manager on my Ubuntu Focal system here, I can click "+Other Locations" and enter in "sftp://zork.net/" on the "Connect to Server" input bar at the bottom of the window.  That causes a "Zork.Net" location to appear between my Rubbish Bin and my location bookmarks on the left sidebar, and the right pane shows all of the files in my home directory on that system.

It can be handy sometimes to select photos, for example, based on their thumbnails.  If I want to publish a set of photographs, I'm often glancing over them to rule out the ones that contain faces of people who do not wish to have photos of themselves shared on the Internet.  So I can Ctrl-click a bunch of images I want to publish, Ctrl-C to copy, and then pop over to my SFTP volume where I find or create a subdirectory of my ~/public_html/ and Ctrl-V to paste them in.

I also use this a lot to grab stuff out of the /tmp/ directory on my server.  If someone mails me a PDF, usually I save it to /tmp/ and fire up the file browser on sftp://zork.net/tmp/ and just open it straight in Evince.