I’m using WinSCP to interact with a remote server that supports only SFTP and

Question

0

Editorial Team

Asked: June 9, 20262026-06-09T04:34:12+00:00 2026-06-09T04:34:12+00:00

I’m using WinSCP to interact with a remote server that supports only SFTP and

0

I’m using WinSCP to interact with a remote server that supports only SFTP and doesn’t allow SSH access.

My interaction involves moving/deleting a subset of files (identified by file names) in a certain directory.

To simplify this, I would typically synchronize [ Remote -> Local ], delete the files locally using the cygwin commandline (so that I can specify a list of file names instead of selecting files in the GUI) and then synchronize [ Local -> Remote ] to push the deletes to remote.

But, now, I want to further simplify the process so I can hand this over to an operations person. I went looking and was delighted to find that WinSCP supports ‘commands’.

It would be great if I could enter something like this in the ‘Command’ field at the bottom in the ‘Commander’ view of WinSCP:

get queue-queue-from-DLQ-ID-69703273-db51-11e1-ba9f-005056010165 \
    queue-queue-from-DLQ-ID-3d64697a-db51-11e1-b86e-005056010166 \
    queue-queue-from-DLQ-ID-76fdb365-db50-11e1-b78d-005056010164 \
    queue-queue-from-DLQ-ID-76ed3836-db50-11e1-ba9f-005056010165

But when I enter this in the ‘Command’ field, I get the following error:

Current SFTP-3 session does not support command you request. Separate shell session may be opened to process the command. Do you want to open separate shell session?

Error 1

When I hit ok, I get the following error:

Error skipping startup message. Your shell is probably incompatible with the application (BASH is recommended).

Error 2

The latter one is probably due to the fact that SSH is not supported.

But my question is, since get is an SFTP command, why am I getting the first error? Doesn’t WinSCP itself use that command under the covers to support a GUI ‘copy to local’ operation?

How can I configure either WinSCP or the Linux box so that I can do what I have shown above?