What is function of PuTTY, in layman's terms?

Question

I hear of this program named PuTTY, I research it, but all the descriptions of it are over my head. SSH? Telnet? Tunnels? I don't get ANY OF IT. Anyone, please describe it all in laymans terms. Don't direct me to sites like google or wikipedia either (been there, done that). Thanks!

Answer 1

PuTTY is a program that enables you to have a command line interface with a unix based system elsewhere. For example, if I have a UNIX based web server running and I am on a windows machine, I can use PuTTY to log into the server and do anything I need to do via whatever protocol I need to do it. If I need to transfer files, I can tunnel in with SSH and do anything I need to do.

Answer 2

PuTTY is an enhanced client to access UNIX based systems from a command line. Historically people would use "telnet", "ftp", and "tftp" to interact with a UNIX system (telnet and ftp being more common). Unfortunately those protocols were not considered secure so a replacement protocol was written as ssh (aka secured shell). Most UNIX like operating systems have started disabling the unsecured protocols as a default in favor of the secured protocols. UNIX systems included the necessary tools to access between systems but MS Windows does not so PuTTY was written for them. Microsoft does include telnet, ftp, tftp from MS DOS, but not ssh.

Oh, telnet and ssh (after authentication) basically provide a way to remotely access a system as though from a command line.

Answer 3

basically puTTy is like a gateway to a server using FreeBSD which is pretty much unix you can create (well at on the server that I'm using) C programs as well as C++ you know how a Virtual Machine work well its pretty much the same your computer just acts as the server you can do pretty much everything that you can do if the O/S was really on your computer

hope that helped