Windows 10 is becoming a useful Unix/Linux sysadmin platform. First, it has incorporated Windows Subsystem for Linux in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update[1]. Now, in the Windows 10 April 2018 Update[2], Microsoft has finally brought a native Secure Shell (SSH) to Windows[3].
It's taken a long time. Microsoft started work on porting OpenSSH to PowerShell[4] in 2015 because of user demand.
Read also: Here's how you can still get a free Windows 10 upgrade[5]
Finally, though, you'll no longer need third-party SSH clients such as Putty[6] when you connect to a system running a SSH server. OpenSSH[7] is a collection of client/server utilities. It enables developers and administrators to use secure remote login, remote file transfer, and public/private key pair management with any system with an OpenSSH server.
OpenSSH is commonly used with BSD, Linux, macOS, and Unix servers, but it can be used with any platform, including Windows 10, with a SSH server. This particular popular SSH client/server implementation is part of the OpenBSD[8] project.
Microsoft is deploying the latest client version of OpenSSH[9], OpenSSH 7.7[10], as a default in this latest Windows 10 update. The OpenSSH server is also available, but you must install it.
For full instructions on how to use this command-line interface program, check out the OpenSSH manual page[11]. The most common way to use it is to connect to a remote server. If you're using passwords, this is done with the following command:
ssh [user]@[host]
If it's your first connection to a particular SSH server, it will display