using alias instead of IP in scp

Question

I have a desktop in the office that I often need to access from home and use scp to copy files. Currently I am doing it like this

scp [email protected]  ...

I want a mechanism that I dont have to type the IP address each time I want to scp something. I was trying to do it by creating an alias, but it doesn't seem to work. Can I give my desktop machine a name so that instead of typing the ip address I can use the name of the machine instead ?

Answer 1

One way to deal with this is to create an entry in your ssh configuration. This can be done on a system wide basis or, if you don't have root access on this box, just for your user.

The per user configuration file is ~/.ssh/config and uses the following format

host my_desktop
    hostname 11.22.33.44

This method is also nice because you can specify other options like the user name. To find out more about the options available try man ssh_config.