SSH Access
SSH access allows clients to take advantage of easy maintenance of their sites in a LINUX shell. Clients are able to roam through their sites, change permissions, move files, delete files, and debug scripts. Compiling programs or manipulation of MySQL databases is also possible (depending on your hosting plan). SSH is a replacement for the insecure telnet and with tools such as Putty it becomes just as easy to use your shell account as you used to with the old telnet.
Available Shells
Shells are programs (that are not part of the operating system kernel) that allow you to run programs through the command line and see their output. There are different types of shells available to our customers.
Jailed Shell
cPanel’s jailed shell came from service providers’ desire to establish a clean cut separation between the various services and customers, mainly for security and ease of administration reasons. Instead of adding a new layer of fine-grained configuration options, the solution adopted was to compartmentalize the system, both its files and its resources, in such a way that only the right person(s) are allowed access to the right compartment(s).
Bourne-Again Shell (bash)
The folks from the Free Software Foundation created an exceedingly souped-up version of the so called Bourne shell with automated command completion and plenty of additional functionality. Linux systems typically choose Bash as the “basic” shell used by default. This is by far the most popular shell used by our customers.
Korn shell (ksh)
Korn shell (ksh) written by David Korn, of Bell Labs, is available on virtually any Unix-like system sold in the 1990’s and beyond.
It’s a reasonable platform for both interactive system control as well as shell script programming, providing far superior functionality to the Bourne Shell. In many cases, it is quite a bit faster, too.
Z Shell (zsh)
Zsh is basically an extended bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some of the most useful features of bash, ksh, and tcsh.