From within telnet (putty), can I download a file to my computer?

"I had similar problem, I used the copy feature in putty - just select (hilites text) in putty window and you can paste directly into Windows app. This is ok for key files since they will fit in one screen.

If you have a larger amount of text I've resorted to just mailing the file I need to myself"

"Best to use sftp or an ftp client that will allow you to display and get hidden files.

But the answer to the question as written is: in the bad-old-days, we used [xyz]modem to do this. Putty may even have this technology built in, but you'll need the send client (called sz on unix machines) at the far end for this to work."

"I like the ZModem suggestion, but I'm surprised nobody has suggested uuencode yet, which shouldn't require a different SSH client -- assuming most terminal packages can simply log the terminal output to a file. Even if it can't, short enough files fit on screen and can be copy/pasted to a Notepad window.

So, on the UNIX side, uuencode the binary file you want to send, capture the terminal's text output of that uuencoding to a text file in Windows, and then uudecode that text file on the Windows side to reconstitute the original binary file. Very primitive, but it works like a charm.

See this Wikipedia article on Uuencoding. I trust you can find uuencode/uudecode utilities as part of the excellent Cygwin project."

"For a SSH key specifically, you can probably just make the terminal window larger, cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and copy the key (by selecting the text) and pasting locally.

For larger, or binary files, look into SCP (or SFTP)"