Pipes Over SSH

Instead of first creating a tarball and then using scp to transfer it to another host, you could simply:

tar -cz foo/ | ssh USER@HOST 'tar -xzC /remote/dir/'

This command will compress the directory foo on the host you are logged in, pipe the tarball through SSH and redirect the output to the file foo.tar.gz on the remote host.

NOTE: In contrast to the description of remote commands you need to use quotes in this example. otherwise the redirection would take place on the local instead of the remote host.

NOTE: This command will create ‘trailing garbage’ in the archive. This does not violate your data but causes an annoying error message to be printed out upon archive operations. Currently i don’t know how to solve this.

For a practical scenario see the note about xauth.