As opposed to SCP, which only allows for single-command transfers, SFTP provides the user with a simple interactive shell for transferring files between your machine and another computer (most likely a server). In addition to providing support for uploading and downloading files, the SFTP shell allows for limited navigation through and manipulation of the local and remote file systems.

Start SFTP by typing sftp username@server_name at the prompt, filling in the appropriate values for your username and the server's name. The commands that you'll most likely need are listed in Table 4.1, “SSH file transfer (SFTP) commands”.

	Note
	SFTP commands look a lot like those discussed in Section 3.2, “Navigating the file system” and Section 3.3, “Manipulating the file system”, but commands to be run on the local machine (the one in front of you) have an l prefix (such as lls), while commands to be run on the remote machine (the one you're connecting to) don't have an l prefix (such as ls).

As far as I can tell, command history and command completion (discussed in Section 3.1, “Features of the shell”) are not available in SFTP. In addition, you cannot transfer entire directories through SFTP; you must compress them first into a tarball^[36] and then transfer the tarball.