How to ssh into Amazon EC2 Linux instance (and copy stuff over)

This is easy enough on an absolute scale but can be a bit of a nightmare if you're windows-oriented (as I unfortunately am ... but I am trying to snap out of it).

Here's a list of steps:

• Create amazon instance with a new key pair
• Save your private key to a known location (it's a .pem file you'll download in the process)
• Make sure the folder with the private key has appropriate access otherwise it won't work (e.g. on mac: chmod -R 700 path/to/pvtk).
• In the EC2 dashboard go the the security group settings for the instance and open ssh port 22
• Connect: ssh -i path/to/key/myKey.pem root@my-ec2-public-ip.amazonaws.com 

An alternative to referencing your key on the ssh command is to add it via ssh-add (on mac).

Another thing you might wanna do is to copy stuff over to the EC2 instance - you can use the scp command:

scp test/winning.txt root@my-ec2-public-ip.amazonaws.com:temp-files/

Good luck!