tar -czf – bla | ssh oherhost “(cd /somewher/to/restore && tar -xzf -)”

tar jcvf user@host:/somedir/file.tar.bz2 –rsh-command=/usr/bin/ssh /sourcedir/

In my case I wanted to untar. The solution is :

ssh serveur “cat file.tar” | untar -xvf -

Which is the “one-liner” to copy a file from “remote2″ to “homepc” ?
Let’s say it’s “remote2:/repository/somefile.war” (I googled around but not found easy method)

Although I didn’t use the -h option, tar nevertheless followed symlinks and not recreated them on other side. Distro was Ubuntu 8.04. When I tried it with a small set of files, it worked, though, but I needed the entire tree. I never figured it out why it acted like that.

I was finally able to solve my problem by using rsync and after inital setup it worked very well. So for anyone stumbling over the same rock, here’s some examples getting it done with rsync:
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/rsync/cnN5bmM=/sort-by-votes

tar czvf - /somedir | ssh user@host "tar xvzf - -C /outputdir

tar czvf - /somedir | ssh user@host "cat - | tar xzfv - -C /outputdir"

tar czvf - /somedir | ssh user@host "cat - | tar xzfv - -C /outputdir

2) …for every CR (0×13) an extra LF character will be injected (0×10) for proper displaying on terminal.

I had to copy all the files from server A to a directory in server B (in order to have full replica of A), using man-in-the-middle server (because that IP was the only one allowed to connect).

The trouble was that I only had sudo rights on the first server and there were absolutely all ports closed (both ways) except incoming 22 for my ip and incoming 80 and 443 for serving web. No way to ssh out of that box (fw blocked outgoing syn packets)

First I had to “initialize” sudo so that I wouldn’t be asked a password which would later be asked within the pipe so I can’t provide it then (you recognize it by the infinite delay in the beginning while files are not appearing to the other side).

ssh -Ct serverA "sudo hostname
Password:

-C uses compression,
-t forces assigning a terminal (RHEL 5.1 by default requires terminal)

I guess this can be achieved also by just sshing in and issuing the same command there. Hostname is just a random command to get sudo to ask for password (which it remembers for the next 15 minutes).

Now for the fun part:

ssh -Ct "stty -onlcr; sudo tar -cpf - -X /tmp/exclusion.list / 2> /dev/null" | ssh serverB "cd /tmp; tar cvpf -"

stty -onlcr fixes a problem that arises with using forced terminal: for every CR (0×13) an extra LF character will be injected (0×13) for proper displaying on terminal. Only we’re actually not using a terminal but passing the bitstream through the ssh tunnel to tar.

-p preserves files’ permissions
-X specifies an exclusion file (directories I don’t want to be copied like /dev, /proc and /sys)
/ is what I want to be tarred :)
2> /dev/null sends tar commentary to the darkest of places. Without it you’ll get tar’s own chatter within the data stream.

Hope this will be useful to someone (like myself, later on)

$ tar czvf – /var/spool | nc -l 12345
$ nc host 12345 | tar xzvf -

it’s not secure, but it doesn’t require much

is there a way to write a shell script that can automatically write data to tape every end of day?