Why does PuTTY & SFTP has to be logged in separately? I thought they were all based on SSH

"Thanks for the tips, guys, I know you can use a private key to login, but I still do not understand the design here, why not login once, use SSH, SCP, SFTP or whatever you want? They can eve share connections! Is this theoretically possible? Why hasn't anyone made something like this?

EDIT: solved it myself. Bitvise Tunnelier can open cas much as consoles, SFTP window as possible with a single SSH connection."

"The ""why"" is because PuTTY and PSFTP are two separate free-standing programs - the school of thought behind their design is ""do one thing, and do it well"", and that ""one thing"" is being a SSH terminal/SFTP client.

To do what you're looking for - use one password to log into both an SSH and SFTP session - you need one piece of software that's designed to do both things. I use WinSCP for this, and it's both free and Free. Its built-in terminal is somewhat underpowered, but if you also have PuTTY on your computer and tell WinSCP where it is (and set the preference to remember your session password and pass it to PuTTY), it will do what you ask - from an open WinSCP session you can do a Ctrl-P, and it will open a PuTTY instance, connect it to the same server, and log in with the password you used to log into WinSCP."

Even in OpenSSH (GNU/Linux) ssh and scp are two separate programs. However, they do authenticate the same way (ie: look for the same public/private key files in $HOME/.ssh).

In putty and pscp, you need to go into your connection manager and set your username for each connection. When you install your public key onto the box you are logging in to, you will get neither the username prompt, nor the password prompt. The only thing you will have to do is unlock your private key a single time when you start Pageant. Then login to your heart's content with no prompting necessary.

There are commercially available tools that share a single connection between ssh and scp/sftp. For better or worse, putty's tools are individual executables, so that doesn't work. As others have suggested, it's possible to set up ssh keys to mitigate the password typing, but in the end, that results in establishing multiple connections. If you really want to share a connection for everything, check out the official ssh client: link text