In most cases, the client-side characteristics of a Secure Shell session are governed by the system-wide configuration file, /etc/ssh/ssh_config. The settings in the ssh_config file can be overridden by the user's configuration file, ~/.ssh/config. In addition, the user can override both configuration files on the command line.
The settings in the server's /etc/ssh/sshd_config file determine which client requests are permitted by the server. For a list of server configuration settings, see Keywords in Secure Shell. For detailed information, see the sshd_config (4) man page.
The keywords in the client configuration file are listed in Keywords in Secure Shell. If the keyword has a default value, the value is given. These keywords are described in detail in the ssh (1) , scp (1) , sftp (1) , and ssh_config (4) man pages. For a list of keywords in alphabetical order and their equivalent command-line overrides, see Table 2–5.