Putty Commands Cheat Sheet

What People Mean When They Ask for a PuTTY Commands Cheat Sheet

PuTTY isn't a command interpreter. It's an SSH and telnet client for Windows. That means there aren't really "PuTTY commands" in the way people usually ask about. What you're actually looking for is either the PuTTY configuration interface options or the Linux/Unix shell commands you run once you're connected. A lot of people land here after opening PuTTY and being confused about what to type next, or they want a quick reference for common SSH commands they can paste into their sessions. I've been running PuTTY on servers for years, sometimes just sitting in a command line with a blinking cursor waiting for something to happen. The truth is most of what you need is standard Linux command line work. PuTTY is just the window you're looking through.

PuTTY Commands Cheat Sheet

Here are the things you'll actually use, broken down by what layer they belong to. PuTTY connection settings (left panel): The session window is where you enter the hostname or IP, pick the port, and choose the connection type. SSH is default. Telnet is rare and only for legacy equipment. Select your saved sessions by clicking them in the Saved Sessions box, then click Load to pull the config into the active session field. PuTTY window controls while running: Right-click the title bar for copy, paste, resize, and full-screen toggles. You can also change window size with the System menu in the top-left corner. The Options button inside the window switches between simple and advanced pane views without restarting the application.

Common SSH Commands You'll Run Through PuTTY

Once you're authenticated, here's the stuff that actually matters in day-to-day work. Checking disk usage. df -h shows you filesystem sizes in human-readable format. du -sh /var/log tells you exactly how big a directory is. I once had a server fill up because nobody knew a single application was writing multi-gigabyte log files to /tmp. This command would have caught it weeks earlier. Process management. ps aux | grep nginx finds a process by name. top gives you a live view of CPU and memory. htop is better if your distro has it installed, which most do. Kill a runaway process with kill -9 PID. The minus-nine flag forces termination. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you should use regular kill PID first and give the process a chance to shut down cleanly.

File operations. ls -la lists everything including hidden files with permissions and timestamps. cp -r source/ dest/ copies a directory recursively. mv oldname newname moves or renames. rm -rf directory/ deletes recursively. Be careful with that one. I deleted the wrong directory once because I didn't check my current path. I was still running commands from /var/www instead of the intended folder. The backup was stale. It took three hours to restore from a tape backup that nobody had verified in six months. Network diagnostics. ping host tests connectivity. netstat -tlnp shows listening ports and their associated processes. ss -tlnp is the modern replacement for netstat on newer systems. curl -I https://example.com checks HTTP headers. dig example.com queries DNS. These are things you run constantly when something is broken and you're trying to figure out where the break is. User and permission management. whoami confirms which user you're logged in as. sudo -i opens a root shell. chmod 755 file sets permissions. chown user:group file changes ownership. useradd -m username creates a new user with a home directory. usermod -aG sudo username adds a user to the sudo group. I spent two days troubleshooting a permissions issue on a shared server where someone had run chmod 777 on an entire web directory. Everything was world-writable. It worked but it was a security nightmare.

Session Management and Workflow Shortcuts

Saving sessions in PuTTY matters more than people realize. If you connect to the same five servers daily, saving each one with the right hostname, port, username, and terminal settings cuts connection time from about thirty seconds of typing and clicking down to maybe five seconds of scrolling and pressing Enter. The difference adds up over a week. To save a session, configure it the way you want it, type a name in the Saved Sessions field, and click Save. PuTTY stores these in the Windows registry by default. You can also export individual sessions to .reg files or import them from another machine. Moving your saved sessions to a new computer is a one-minute drag and drop if you know where the registry key is, which is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions. Keystroke mapping is another thing worth configuring. In Connection > Keyboard, you can set the Function key and Escape key behavior. The default PuTTY mapping sends F1 as ^[[11~ instead of the standard ^OP that most Linux applications expect. If you're constantly frustrated by F1-F4 not doing what they should in your shell, switch the Function keys to XTerm R6 style. It takes one click and fixes a dozen annoying interactions every day.

Copy and paste work differently in PuTTY than you might expect. Left-click and drag selects text. Right-click pastes it. In Windows terminal apps, Ctrl+C copies and Ctrl+V pastes. PuTTY uses the X Window convention. If you've spent years in PowerShell or CMD, this takes a week to rewire your muscle memory. After that, it's faster than anything else because selecting text for a log line or command output is one fluid motion.

SSH Key Authentication Setup

Password authentication works fine until someone changes a password or you're automating something. SSH keys solve that. Generate a key on your Windows machine with PuTTYgen, which ships with PuTTY. Create an RSA key at least 4096 bits. Paste the public key into the remote server's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. Then in PuTTY, go to Connection > SSH > Auth and browse to your .ppk private key file. Connect and you shouldn't be prompted for a password again. The downside is key management. If you lose the .ppk file, you're locked out unless you have password access as a fallback. I've had to physically travel to a datacenter because my encrypted key file was on a laptop that got stolen. Never store your only private key on a single device. Keep a backup on an encrypted USB drive in a different location.

Session Logging and Recovery

PuTTY can log everything you see in the terminal to a file. This is useful for auditing but also for debugging connection issues. Go to Session > Logging, choose "All session output," and pick a filepath. The logs can get large fast. A busy server with automated monitoring tools generating output can produce several gigabytes in a week. Rotate your logs or limit the file size, or you'll fill a drive and wonder why nothing is writing anywhere. When a session drops unexpectedly, you can reconnect to the same host and the command history from your shell session will still be there if you use tmux or screen. PuTTY itself doesn't preserve shell state across reconnects. Tmux survives a dropped connection. I run tmux on every server I manage. It means if my internet blinks for ten seconds, I'm back where I was within a few keystrokes. Without it, I'm starting over from a blank prompt and hoping I remember the last command I was running.

Advanced PuTTY Configuration You Should Know About

Window > Translation lets you set the character encoding. UTF-8 is correct for almost everything modern. If you're connecting to an older system that uses ISO-8859-1 or something else, setting this wrong makes special characters look like garbage. I've seen support tickets go nowhere for days because the technician couldn't read the error messages due to a character encoding mismatch. Connection > SSH > Allowed auth methods controls what authentication options PuTTY offers. You can disable password authentication entirely and force key-based login, which closes a whole class of brute-force attacks. If you do this, make absolutely sure your key is configured and working before you disable the password. I did this once on a production server at 2 AM and spent the next forty-five minutes on the phone with a colleague who had to physically type the password at the machine because I'd locked myself out remotely. Window > Colours lets you customize the color scheme. The default white-on-black is fine. Some people prefer the Linux console green-on-black. It doesn't matter technically. It only matters for how much strain your eyes take during a long session. I keep a custom scheme saved because the default made certain syntax highlighting unreadable on a poorly calibrated monitor.

Connection > Seconds between keepalives should be set to something like 30 if you're crossing unstable networks or going through routers that drop idle connections. Without keepalives, your SSH session times out silently after a period of inactivity, and any background jobs you launched die with it. A nonzero value sends a null packet through the connection to keep it alive.

Limitations and When PuTTY Isn't the Right Tool

PuTTY only handles SSH, telnet, serial, and raw TCP connections. If you need SCP or SFTP file transfers, PuTTY includes pscp and psftp command-line tools, but they're basic. For frequent file transfers, WinSCP is faster and has a graphical interface. For SFTP specifically, the command-line tools work but don't support interactive directory browsing the way a dedicated client does. PuTTY doesn't support Mosh, which is useful for mobile or unstable connections. Mosh maintains state across IP changes and reduces latency on high-ping links. If you're connecting from a laptop over a spotty wifi network, regular SSH sessions will feel sluggish and drop frequently. Mosh handles that gracefully. PuTTY cannot do Mosh. There's also no built-in terminal multiplexer. Tmux and screen exist on the remote side, not in PuTTY itself. You configure them on the server. This isn't a PuTTY problem, but people sometimes assume it is when their session dies and they lose their working environment.

For Windows-to-Windows management, PowerShell remoting or Windows Remote Management is usually more appropriate than SSH into a Windows machine. PuTTY can connect to Windows via SSH if you install an SSH server, but that's an extra component most Windows admins don't need or want running on their systems.

Getting the Software

PuTTY downloads from putty.org. The latest version as of my knowledge cutoff is 0.82. There's a 32-bit and 64-bit installer and also portable executables that don't require installation. The portable version is useful if you keep it on a USB drive and need to connect from machines where you can't install software. Just copy the entire PuTTY folder to the new machine and run putty.exe directly.