Is it possible to load PuTTY connection information (session) from file

putty

Is it possible to load PuTTY connection information (session) from file?

Not from registry, not from command line, but from file?

I would like to have a file per each remote computer and open it with PuTTY so that it connects automatically.

Something like:

putty -load myfile.connection

UPDATE

putty user@host:port will not load multiple parameters, like encoding, colors, etc

While putty -load "session name" will take data from the registry

I wish to read data from file.

Best Answer

You can create a .reg file with all the settings:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions\MySession]
"HostName"="example.com"
"Colour0"="187,187,187"
...

Import the settings using the reg command:

reg import MySession.reg

And then load the imported settings using the -load switch of PuTTY:

putty.exe -load MySession

If you want, you can have the key deleted using the reg delete after starting PuTTY.

A complete batch file would be:

@echo off
reg import MySession.reg 
start putty.exe -load MySession
timeout /t 2
reg delete HKCU\SOFTWARE\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions\mysession /f

(The two-second timeout is there to let the PuTTY load the settings before it gets deleted).

And of course there are loads of PuTTY clones that support configuration INI files. For example KiTTY.

Another option is to make use of WinSCP that can open PuTTY from a session specified on WinSCP command-line:

winscp.exe ssh://martin@example.com/

While WinSCP allows much wider set of options on its command-line, it does not support terminal-specific options, like colors.

(I'm the author of WinSCP)

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