I remember that they (Microsoft) mentioned the bash shell on Windows 10 a while ago and other Linux/Ubuntu integration stuff but at the time it seemed to be just a gimmick.

But since I’m looking into Nagios and some Windows monitoring I now the need to daily connect to my Nagios server making configuration changes. So far I’ve been using good old Putty/WinSCP and it works well. Then I started looking at a way to generate configurations files for some Windows machines and upload them automatically via PowerShell (or it could end up being another tool created in C# eventually). This is how I stumble across the Windows 10 built in SSH functionality – it’s been there for at least a year! (since build 1803).

That means you can simply use the ssh command in a Windows command shell (or PowerShell) and send commands to your Linux server. To start it simple open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and run ssh:

As can be seen it supports all the basics of any ssh client.

So that cover the basics. The real power comes when you start mixing it with PowerShell and proper scripting and/or batch files.

One very interesting (and incredibly useful) example is something Scott Hanselman posted – how to automatically log into a remote linux machine – see this.