WinSCP Technical Requirements

For SFTP, the only requirement beyond the server requirements above is to run SFTP on the server. It is best to run it as a SSH-2 subsystem. If you select SFTP-only on the login screen and the SFTP subsystem is not found, WinSCP will try to find the SFTP server in some common directories (/usr/lib/sftp-server, /usr/local/lib/sftp-server, etc.). This way, it is possible to use SFTP even with SSH-1, which does not support subsystems.

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1. == Ordered List Item ==

A number of restricted shell environments exist for supporting SFTP/SCP only accounts. These systems restrict the user to a small subset of commands needed to manipulate files while denying the ability to execute arbitrary commands. Some of these environments create incompatibilities with WinSCP, particularly if using SCP.

Most shells nowadays offer options to make the user experience better. Unfortunately many of these options make the shell incompatible with WinSCP.

This mainly affects the SCP protocol. An example is colorized output with the ls command that outputs ANSI color sequences to the command output which WinSCP is unable to parse.

Also, the SFTP protocol can be affected. A typical example is where some message is printed from a start-up script. WinSCP (and any other SFTP client) will attempt to parse the message as an SFTP packet, which will obviously fail.

You should configure your start-up scripts to conform to non-interactive sessions (like WinSCP). Some shells call different profile/start-up scripts for interactive and non-interactive sessions. You can also use some environment variables, such as TERM to distinguish interactive and non-interactive sessions.

WinSCP should run on any system running Windows 95 or later. WinSCP requires at most 10 MiB of free disk space.

WinSCP also runs on Linux platforms where Crossover 4.x or later is running. Crossover is the commercial development of the Wine project.