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SSHFS

filesystem client based on SSH

Manual section:1
Manual group:User Commands

Synopsis

To mount a filesystem:

sshfs [user@]host:[dir] mountpoint [options]

If host is a numeric IPv6 address, it needs to be enclosed in square brackets.

To unmount it:

fusermount3 -u mountpoint   # Linux
umount mountpoint           # OS X, FreeBSD

Description

SSHFS allows you to mount a remote filesystem using SSH (more precisely, the SFTP subsystem). Most SSH servers support and enable this SFTP access by default, so SSHFS is very simple to use - there's nothing to do on the server-side.

By default, file permissions are ignored by SSHFS. Any user that can access the filesystem will be able to perform any operation that the remote server permits - based on the credentials that were used to connect to the server. If this is undesired, local permission checking can be enabled with -o default_permissions.

By default, only the mounting user will be able to access the filesystem. Access for other users can be enabled by passing -o allow_other. In this case you most likely also want to use -o default_permissions.

It is recommended to run SSHFS as regular user (not as root). For this to work the mountpoint must be owned by the user. If username is omitted SSHFS will use the local username. If the directory is omitted, SSHFS will mount the (remote) home directory. If you need to enter a password sshfs will ask for it (actually it just runs ssh which ask for the password if needed).

Options

-o opt,[opt...]
mount options, see below for details. A a variety of SSH options can be given here as well, see the manual pages for sftp(1) and ssh_config(5).
-h, --help print help and exit.
-V, --version print version information and exit.
-d, --debug print debugging information.
-p PORT equivalent to '-o port=PORT'
-f do not daemonize, stay in foreground.
-s Single threaded operation.
-C equivalent to '-o compression=yes'
-F ssh_configfile
 specifies alternative ssh configuration file
-o reconnect automatically reconnect to server if connection is interrupted. Attempts to access files that were opened before the reconnection will give errors and need to be re-opened.
-o delay_connect
 Don't immediately connect to server, wait until mountpoint is first accessed.
-o sshfs_sync synchronous writes. This will slow things down, but may be useful in some situations.
-o no_readahead
 Only read exactly the data that was requested, instead of speculatively reading more to anticipate the next read request.
-o sync_readdir
 synchronous readdir. This will slow things down, but may be useful in some situations.
-o namemap=TYPE

How to map remote username/groupnames to local values. Possible values are:

none:no translation of the name space (default).
user:map the username/groupname of the remote user to username/groupname of the mounting user.
file:translate username/groupname based upon the contents of --unamefile and --gnamefile.
-o unamefile=FILE
file containing username:remote_username mappings for -o namemap=file
-o gnamefile=FILE
file containing groupname:remote_groupname mappings for -o namemap=file
-o nomap=TYPE

with namemap=file, how to handle missing mappings:

ignore:don't do any re-mapping
error:return an error (default)
-o ssh_command=CMD
execute CMD instead of 'ssh'
-o sftp_server=SERV
path to sftp server or subsystem (default: /usr/lib/gesftpserver)
-o directport=PORT
directly connect to PORT bypassing ssh
-o passive communicate over stdin and stdout bypassing network. Useful for mounting local filesystem on the remote side. An example using dpipe command would be dpipe /usr/lib/openssh/gesftpserver = ssh RemoteHostname sshfs :/directory/to/be/shared ~/mnt/src -o passive
-o disable_hardlink
 With this option set, attempts to call link(2) will fail with error code ENOSYS.
-o transform_symlinks
 transform absolute symlinks on remote side to relative symlinks. This means that if e.g. on the server side /foo/bar/com is a symlink to /foo/blub, SSHFS will transform the link target to ../blub on the client side.
-o follow_symlinks
 follow symlinks on the server, i.e. present them as regular files on the client. If a symlink is dangling (i.e, the target does not exist) the behavior depends on the remote server - the entry may appear as a symlink on the client, or it may appear as a regular file that cannot be accessed.
-o no_check_root
 don't check for existence of 'dir' on server
-o password_stdin
 read password from stdin (only for pam_mount!)
-o dir_cache=BOOL
Enables (yes) or disables (no) the SSHFS directory cache. The directory cache holds the names of directory entries. Enabling it allows readdir(3) system calls to be processed without network access.
-o dcache_max_size=N
sets the maximum size of the directory cache.
-o dcache_timeout=N
sets timeout for directory cache in seconds.
-o dcache_{stat,link,dir}_timeout=N
sets separate timeout for {attributes, symlinks, names} in the directory cache.
-o dcache_clean_interval=N
sets the interval for automatic cleaning of the directory cache.
-o dcache_min_clean_interval=N
sets the interval for forced cleaning of the directory cache when full.
-o direct_io

This option disables the use of page cache (file content cache) in the kernel for this filesystem. This has several affects:

  1. Each read() or write() system call will initiate one or more read or write operations, data will not be cached in the kernel.
  2. The return value of the read() and write() system calls will correspond to the return values of the read and write operations. This is useful for example if the file size is not known in advance (before reading it). e.g. /proc filesystem
-o max_conns=N
sets the maximum number of simultaneous SSH connections to use. Each connection is established with a separate SSH process. The primary purpose of this feature is to improve the responsiveness of the file system during large file transfers. When using more than once connection, the password_stdin and passive options can not be used, and the buflimit workaround is not supported.

In addition, SSHFS accepts several options common to all FUSE file systems. These are described in the mount.fuse manpage (look for "general", "libfuse specific", and "high-level API" options).

Caveats / Workarounds

Hardlinks

If the SSH server supports the hardlinks extension, SSHFS will allow you to create hardlinks. However, hardlinks will always appear as individual files when seen through an SSHFS mount, i.e. they will appear to have different inodes and an st_nlink value of 1.

SSHFS hangs for no apparent reason

In some cases, attempts to access the SSHFS mountpoint may freeze if no filesystem activity has occurred for some time. This is typically caused by the SSH connection being dropped because of inactivity without SSHFS being informed about that. As a workaround, you can try to mount with -o ServerAliveInterval=15. This will force the SSH connection to stay alive even if you have no activity.

SSHFS hangs after the connection was interrupted

By default, network operations in SSHFS run without timeouts, mirroring the default behavior of SSH itself. As a consequence, if the connection to the remote host is interrupted (e.g. because a network cable was removed), operations on files or directories under the mountpoint will block until the connection is either restored or closed altogether (e.g. manually). Applications that try to access such files or directories will generally appear to "freeze" when this happens.

If it is acceptable to discard data being read or written, a quick workaround is to kill the responsible sshfs process, which will make any blocking operations on the mounted filesystem error out and thereby "unfreeze" the relevant applications. Note that force unmounting with fusermount3 -zu, on the other hand, does not help in this case and will leave read/write operations in the blocking state.

For a more automatic solution, one can use the -o ServerAliveInterval=15 option mentioned above, which will drop the connection after not receiving a response for 3 * 15 = 45 seconds from the remote host. By also supplying -o reconnect, one can ensure that the connection is re-established as soon as possible afterwards. As before, this will naturally lead to loss of data that was in the process of being read or written at the time when the connection was interrupted.

Mounting from /etc/fstab

To mount an SSHFS filesystem from /etc/fstab, simply use sshfs as the file system type. (For backwards compatibility, you may also use fuse.sshfs).

See also

The mount.fuse(8) manpage.

Getting Help

If you need help, please ask on the <fuse-sshfs@lists.sourceforge.net> mailing list (subscribe at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fuse-sshfs).

Please report any bugs on the GitHub issue tracker at https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/issues.

Authors

SSHFS is currently maintained by Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus@rath.org>, and was created by Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>.

This man page was originally written by Bartosz Fenski <fenio@debian.org> for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution (but it may be used by others).