Use Linux commands on windows directories through ssh

Since I'm stuck with windows at work. I'd like to use a Ubuntu Server machine which i access through SSH from a windows machine to manipulate files on the windows machine. I've been moving files up to the Ubuntu machine through FTP, working on them and then downloading them. Please tell me there is a more efficient solution. Thanks for your help!

To mount your ftp server on the Ubuntu machine instead of copying back and forth, you could use curlftpfs. It allows you to mount a ftp server directly on to the file system of the machine.

An example (from the web-page):

$ mkdir sunet
$ curlftpfs ftp://ftp.sunet.se/ sunet/
$ cd sunet/
$ ls -l
total 0
Dr-xr-xr-x   3 root root        96 Feb 23  2004 bin
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root root        72 Mar  2  2004 dev
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root root        48 Feb 23  2004 etc
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root root       120 Feb 23  2004 lib
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 622187310 Mar 11 06:13 ls-lR
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  76389037 Mar 11 06:15 ls-lR.gz
drwxrwxr-x  37 root root      1272 Feb 27 14:17 pub
dr-xr-xr-x   3 root root        72 Feb 23  2004 usr
$ cd ..
$ fusermount -u sunet/

Putty for windows will let you have full shell access to a SSH server. Winscp is also a must have app for windows and linux/ssh interaction.

You seem to be wanting to 'mount' your windows system to a local directory on the linux machine, then via the ssh terminal, you could edit/change files as if they were local on the linux box.

The 'fuse' tools can allow mounting of a variety of special 'things' as local directories. For example theres a 'fuse ftp' fuse tool.

From the package listings :

curlftpfs - filesystem to access FTP hosts based on FUSE and cURL

There are also similer tools that use ssh:

sshfs - filesystem client based on SSH File Transfer Protocol.

Using SSHFS would require a ssh server on the windows box.

Try winscp simple and easy http://winscp.net/eng/index.php