I used an ssh connection from the Terminal today for the first time!

I feel like a real man now.
I needed to transfer a 106MB folder from one subdomain to another subdomain on my DreamHost webserver. It has been my experience that whenever I copy or move folders with a lot of sub-folders that something(s) do(es) not get copied all the time or all the way. So I needed to archive my files and move them as a single object. But I do not think it is possible to zip files with an FTP client (at least not with Interarchy). For a solution I turned to ssh and a lot of googling.

So to ssh into my webhost I had to enable a user from the DreamHost panel.

Second image from another tutorial.

Then I had to open terminal and create a key. I found some sensible directions in the knowledge base.

To generate a secure public/private key pair to log in securely, and without a password (if you want):
• In Terminal type: ssh-keygen -d

Hit the “enter” key three times.

Replacing “username” and “yourdomain” with your FTP username and your-domain,

• copy & paste/type the following into Terminal:

  ssh username@ftp.yourdomain.com 'test -d .ssh || mkdir -m 0700 .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 0600 .ssh/*' < ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub

Press return/enter key again.
Wait for it to ask for the Password:

Enter the password of the FTP user who's username you inserted in place of the example USERNAME@ftp.yourdomain.com above.
If it asks you for the password multiple times, type in the same correct password each time.

Then you will be at the root in your Terminal window.

• type: ssh username@ftp.yourdomain.com

You're logged in!
Now any time you want to log using SSH you can just repeat
ssh username@ftp.yourdomain.com
from the command line (Terminal), no need to repeat the other steps.

So from here on I was in my webhost but still didn't know how to get around. Evidently I needed to use long paths so $ cd /home/username/directory would move me from directory to directory. I could not just $ cd /directory.

Once I was able to get to the directory I needed to archive, I still needed the archive commands.

I thought I wanted to use zip as my archive utility. The zip command to do that would be:
$ zip -r folder.zip folder
Though my friend Daniel said that I might should have used tar gunzip tar.gz instead of using the zip command: "Zip compresses each file separately and then archives. Tar+gzip or tar+bzip2 archives first and then compresses."

The commands to use the tools Daniel suggested would be like the following:

tar+gzip
$ tar -cf blah.tar folder/
$ gzip -9 blah.tar

gzip compressed tar I guess this is a combination of the above two commands. Not sure. Didn't try it.
$ tar czvf folder.tgz folder

bzip2
$ tar jcvf filename.tbz folder

After the file was compressed I used Interarchy to move the single zip file to its new location. I also needed to unzip the file. (I also read this.)
To unzip the file I navigated to the directory where the file was located and then used this command:
$ unzip folder.zip folder
I had to use the long path too. So it was really:
$ unzip /home/username/directory/folder.zip folder

What a sense of accomplishment!