Back in June the folks over at the Microsoft PowerShell blog indicated they were going to support SSH in Windows soon. I read the post a few times and I must admit I read deeply between the lines and enjoyed the post very much. For example, this passage, with emphasis mine.

Finally, I'd like to share some background on today’s announcement, because this is the 3rd time the PowerShell team has attempted to support SSH. The first attempts were during PowerShell V1 and V2 and were rejected. Given our changes in leadership and culture, we decided to give it another try and this time, because we are able to show the clear and compelling customer value, the company is very supportive. So I want to take a minute and thank all of you in the community who have been clearly and articulately making the case for why and how we should support SSH!

Fast forward a few months and they've just released a VERY early version. It's not quite useful enough for a daily driver but it's heartening that it's happening. Sure, it's late, and ya, it should have happened years ago, but it's happening and it'll be built in. SSH will be one less thing to worry about.

Note as they said:

With this initial milestone complete, we are now making the code publicly available and open for public contributions. Please note that this code is still very early and should be treated as a developer preview and is not supported for use in production.

The repository is over at https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH and the first release is here https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/releases. I just unblocked the zip and unzipped it into my c:\utils folder so it was in my path.

I SSH'ed into an Ubuntu machine I have running in Azure like this:

>ssh scott@foofoo.cloudapp.net -p 12345

I did have an issue immediately with an error and some formatting, which I filed and also discussed here. I was able to mostly work around with it "export TERM=xterm" but I'm sure they'll fix it, as again, it's super early.

As an alternative SSH client, try the Bitvise SSH Client. It has a command line app called "stermc" that acts like SSH. I made an ssh.bat file that contains just "stermc %1" and this let's me shush around nicely.

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