Jacob Repp

My good friend Jayk showed me this nifty trick years ago for moving directories over ssh:

From a local directory to a remote directory:

tar -zcf - . | ssh name@host "tar -zvxf - -C <destination directory>"

From a remote directory to a local directory:

ssh name@host "tar -zcf - -C <source directory> ." | tar -zvxf - 

This works by causing tar to read from stdin or write to stdout “-f -” and piping the results through ssh using the ‘execute command over ssh’.

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