Files transferred over shell protocol

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Files transferred over Shell protocol (FISH) is a network protocol that uses Secure Shell (SSH) or Remote Shell (RSH) to transfer files between computers and manage remote files.

The advantage of FISH is that all it requires on the server-side is an SSH or RSH implementation, Unix shell, and a set of standard Unix utilities (like ls, cat or dd—unlike other methods of remote access to files via a remote shell, scp for example, which requires scp on the server side). Optionally, there can be a special FISH server program (called start_fish_server) on the server, which executes FISH commands instead of Unix shell and thus speeds up operations.

The protocol was designed by Czech Linux Kernel Hacker, Pavel Machek, in 1998 for the Midnight Commander software tool.^[1]