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This chapter provides a general introduction to some more advanced features of PuTTY. For extreme detail and reference purposes, chapter 4 is likely to contain more information.
A lot of PuTTY's complexity and features are in the configuration panel. Once you have worked your way through that and started a session, things should be reasonably simple after that. Nevertheless, there are a few more useful features available.
Often in a PuTTY session you will find text on your terminal screen which you want to type in again. Like most other terminal emulators, PuTTY allows you to copy and paste the text rather than having to type it again. Also, copy and paste uses the Windows clipboard, so that you can paste (for example) URLs into a web browser, or paste from a word processor or spreadsheet into your terminal session.
PuTTY's copy and paste works entirely with the mouse. In order to copy text to the clipboard, you just click the left mouse button in the terminal window, and drag to select text. When you let go of the button, the text is automatically copied to the clipboard. You do not need to press Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Ins; in fact, if you do press Ctrl-C, PuTTY will send a Ctrl-C character down your session to the server where it will probably cause a process to be interrupted.
Pasting is done using the right button (or the middle mouse button, if you have a three-button mouse and have set it up; see section 4.11.2). (Pressing Shift-Ins, or selecting ‘Paste’ from the Ctrl+right-click context menu, have the same effect.) When you click the right mouse button, PuTTY will read whatever is in the Windows clipboard and paste it into your session, exactly as if it had been typed at the keyboard. (Therefore, be careful of pasting formatted text into an editor that does automatic indenting; you may find that the spaces pasted from the clipboard plus the spaces added by the editor add up to too many spaces and ruin the formatting. There is nothing PuTTY can do about this.)
If you double-click the left mouse button, PuTTY will select a whole word. If you double-click, hold down the second click, and drag the mouse, PuTTY will select a sequence of whole words. (You can adjust precisely what PuTTY considers to be part of a word; see section 4.11.5.) If you triple-click, or triple-click and drag, then PuTTY will select a whole line or sequence of lines.
If you want to select a rectangular region instead of selecting to the end of each line, you can do this by holding down Alt when you make your selection. (You can also configure rectangular selection to be the default, and then holding down Alt gives the normal behaviour instead. See section 4.11.4 for details.)
If you have a middle mouse button, then you can use it to adjust an existing selection if you selected something slightly wrong. (If you have configured the middle mouse button to paste, then the right mouse button does this instead.) Click the button on the screen, and you can pick up the nearest end of the selection and drag it to somewhere else.
It's possible for the server to ask to handle mouse clicks in the PuTTY window itself. If this happens, the mouse pointer will turn into an arrow, and using the mouse to copy and paste will only work if you hold down Shift. See section 4.6.2 and section 4.11.3 for details of this feature and how to configure it.
PuTTY keeps track of text that has scrolled up off the top of the terminal. So if something appears on the screen that you want to read, but it scrolls too fast and it's gone by the time you try to look for it, you can use the scrollbar on the right side of the window to look back up the session history and find it again.
As well as using the scrollbar, you can also page the scrollback up and down by pressing Shift-PgUp and Shift-PgDn. You can scroll a line at a time using Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn. These are still available if you configure the scrollbar to be invisible.
By default the last 200 lines scrolled off the top are preserved for you to look at. You can increase (or decrease) this value using the configuration box; see section 4.7.3.
If you click the left mouse button on the icon in the top left corner of PuTTY's terminal window, or click the right mouse button on the title bar, you will see the standard Windows system menu containing items like Minimise, Move, Size and Close.
PuTTY's system menu contains extra program features in addition to the Windows standard options. These extra menu commands are described below.
(These options are also available in a context menu brought up by holding Ctrl and clicking with the right mouse button anywhere in the 2.1 Starting a session
When you start PuTTY, you will see a dialog box. This dialog box allows you to control everything PuTTY can do. See chapter 4 for details of all the things you can control.
You don't usually need to change most of the configuration options. To start the simplest kind of session, all you need to do is to enter a few basic parameters.
In the ‘Host Name’ box, enter the Internet host name of the server you want to connect to. You should have been told this by the provider of your login account.
Now select a login protocol to use, from the ‘Protocol’ buttons. For a login session, you should select Telnet, Rlogin or SSH. See section 1.2 for a description of the differences between the three protocols, and advice on which one to use. The fourth protocol, Raw, is not used for interactive login sessions; you would usually use this for debugging other Internet services (see section 3.6).
When you change the selected protocol, the number in the ‘Port’ box will change. This is normal: it happens because the various login services are usually provided on different network ports by the server machine. Most servers will use the standard port numbers, so you will not need to change the port setting. If your server provides login services on a non-standard port, your system administrator should have told you which one. (For example, many MUDs run Telnet service on a port other than 23.)
Once you have filled in the ‘Host Name’, ‘Protocol’, and possibly ‘Port’ settings, you are ready to connect. Press the ‘Open’ button at the bottom of the dialog box, and PuTTY will begin trying to connect you to the server.
If you are not using the SSH protocol, you can skip this section.
If you are using SSH to connect to a server for the first time, you will probably see a message looking something like this:
The server's host key is not cached in the registry. You
have no guarantee that the server is the computer you
think it is.
The server's rsa2 key fingerprint is:
ssh-rsa 1024 7b:e5:6f:a7:f4:f9:81:62:5c:e3:1f:bf:8b:57:6c:5a
If you trust this host, hit Yes to add the key to
PuTTY's cache and carry on connecting.
If you want to carry on connecting just once, without
adding the key to the cache, hit No.
If you do not trust this host, hit Cancel to abandon the
connection.
This is a feature of the SSH protocol. It is designed to protect you against a network attack known as spoofing: secretly redirecting your connection to a different computer, so that you send your password to the wrong machine. Using this technique, an attacker would be able to learn the password that guards your login account, and could then log in as if they were you and use the account for their own purposes.
To prevent this attack, each server has a unique identifying code, called a host key. These keys are created in a way that prevents one server from forging another server's key. So if you connect to a server and it sends you a different host key from the one you were expecting, PuTTY can warn you that the server may have been switched and that a spoofing attack might be in progress.
PuTTY records the host key for each server you connect to, in the Windows Registry. Every time you connect to a server, it checks that the host key presented by the server is the same host key as it was the last time you connected. If it is not, you will see a warning, and you will have the chance to abandon your connection before you type any private information (such as a password) into it.
However, when you connect to a server you have not connected to before, PuTTY has no way of telling whether the host key is the right one or not. So it gives the warning shown above, and asks you whether you want to trust this host key or not.
Whether or not to trust the host key is your choice. If you are connecting within a company network, you might feel that all the network users are on the same side and spoofing attacks are unlikely, so you might choose to trust the key without checking it. If you are connecting across a hostile network (such as the Internet), you should check with your system administrator, perhaps by telephone or in person. (Some modern servers have more than one host key. If the system administrator sends you more than one fingerprint, you should make sure the one PuTTY shows you is on the list, but it doesn't matter which one it is.)
After you have connected, and perhaps verified the server's host key, you will be asked to log in, probably using a username and a password. Your system administrator should have provided you with these. Enter the username and the password, and the server should grant you access and begin your session. If you have mistyped your password, most servers will give you several chances to get it right.
If you are using SSH, be careful not to type your username wrongly, because you will not have a chance to correct it after you press Return; many SSH servers do not permit you to make two login attempts using different usernames. If you type your username wrongly, you must close PuTTY and start again.
If your password is refused but you are sure you have typed it correctly, check that Caps Lock is not enabled. Many login servers, particularly Unix computers, treat upper case and lower case as different when checking your password; so if Caps Lock is on, your password will probably be refused.
After you log in to the server, what happens next is up to the server! Most servers will print some sort of login message and then present a prompt, at which you can type commands which the server will carry out. Some servers will offer you on-line help; others might not. If you are in doubt about what to do next, consult your system administrator.
When you have finished your session, you should log out by typing the server's own logout command. This might vary between servers; if in doubt, try logout or exit, or consult a manual or your system administrator. When the server processes your logout command, the PuTTY window should close itself automatically.
You can close a PuTTY session using the Close button in the window border, but this might confuse the server - a bit like hanging up a telephone unexpectedly in the middle of a conversation. We recommend you do not do this unless the server has stopped responding to you and you cannot close the window any other way.
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[PuTTY release 0.58]