cogdogblog

Note: CogDogBlog has a new WordPress powered home at http://cogdogblog.com/. All entries from this version have been moved there, so as a guide dog service try finding this article in its new home by title search.

Fugu Rocks sFTP- better than the Captain, The Dud, The Truck, The Duck

More and more I have needed a Mac OSX SFTP client for moving web content to various servers- we have knocked off open FTP on all of our web servers, and I need it now for loading content to SourceForge. Pity that my long friend Fetch, used since the early 1990s, has yet to jump up to SFTP.

It has been a road of trying a bunch of different apps, none of which was reliable (many do odd things with file permissions). On the scrap heap is:

• The Truck: Transmit it worked ok (I recall) but was funly with permissions, and you had to pay for it.
• The Captain: Captain FTP yes shareware, not much-- my programmer Colen uses it but claims it has quirks.
• The Dud: MacSFTP- could never use the demo, the download was already expired
• The Duck: CyberDuck - Free and a cool icon... I had gotten use out of the Duck last few months, but it overwrites file permissions, you cannot upload a multiple selection of files, and it takes a minutes to register the first transsfer. Worse, every transfer seemed to want me to click to allow a transmission. It never would connect to sourceForge's server.

And today I think I found the winner-- Fugu from the University of Michigan. It is free, has a clean interface, and works well without mucking up permissions. I am still not crazy about two-paned transfer interfaces (I like dragging and dropping from the desktop to.from Fetch)... but that is just a matter of adjustment.