cellio: (avatar)
Monica ([personal profile] cellio) wrote2014-03-16 06:40 pm

secure FTP client for Mac?

Dear Brain Trust,

I have a Mac (Snow Leopard) and a Unix shell account out there on the net, and occasionally I want to move files between them. I can run sftp from the command line, but when dealing with larger directory structures I'd sometimes like something a little more, err, visual. (I know; some of you are calling for me to turn in my geek card now.) But it has to support a secure mode, not plain old FTP. (Quite aside from my own sensibilities on the matter, my shell provider now requires it.)

I was using CyberDuck for a while but it stopped working (it just crashes on start now), and then I switched to FileZilla. FileZilla has a nicer UI so that's a win, but I'm at a loss for how to make it use sftp instead of ftp -- it wants a keystore file, and I don't know where I have one of those, though I presume I must have one somewhere because I use ssh to connect to this shell account. FileZilla helpfully tells me that it can use ssh directly instead if I just set SSH_AUTH_SOCK correctly. That sounds like it wants a socket, but, um, what?

So, dear Mac-admin-aware portion of my brain trust, how should I proceed?