Networking – Copying Files from Remote Device Without Creating an Archive

A common way of doing this is to first copy it to a temporary file name, preferably a hidden file. When the copy finishes, the script that is doing the copy then renames it to the non-hidden filename.

The script on machine B could then watch for non-hidden files.

The script on machine A would look something like this:

for file in `ls *` ; do
    scp $file user@host:~/.${file}.tmp
    ssh user@host "mv ~/.${file}.tmp $file"
done

Although this does not satisfy OP's desire to use the one-line

scp * user@host:~/

it accomplishes the same thing and also allows machine B to transfer each file as it finishes without waiting for the next file.

You can use SSH tunneling for this.

Using tunneling you can forward a TCP port either from your local machine to the remote machine, or from the remote machine to your local machine. I use it frequently to forward e.g. SMTP or IMAP ports from a remote machine behind a firewall to my local machine (and then access the services locally, as if they were running locally).

To forward port 22 (SSH) from you local machine to the remote machine try this:

ssh -R12345:localhost:22 yourremoteuser@remotemachine

(Note that localhost refers to the local name of the remote machine)

After running this you should be able to ssh back home using:

ssh -p12345 yourlocaluser@127.0.0.1

When using scp, you would do something like (scp has an uppercase P for port forwarding):

scp -P12345 filename 127.0.0.1:/tmp/filename

Port forwarding in the other direction (from remote to local) uses -L instead of -R.

The above commands assume that you are using a terminal ssh client. Graphical clients, like PuTTY for Windows, also support tunneling