Bash SSH Tar – How to Compress a Directory Using Tar/Gz Over SSH to Local Computer

bashsshtar

I'd like to essentially tar/gz a directory on a remote machine and save the file to my local computer without having to connect back into my local machine from the remote one. Is there a way to do this over SSH? The tar file doesn't need to be stored on the remote machine, only on the local machine. Is this possible?

Best Answer

You can do it with an ssh command, just tell tar to create the archive on its standard output:

ssh remote.example.com 'cd /path/to/directory && tar -cf - foo | gzip -9' >foo.tgz

Another approach, which is more convenient if you want to do a lot of file manipulations on the other machine but is overkill for a one-shot archive creation, is to mount the remote machine's filesystem with SSHFS (a FUSE filesystem). You should enable compression at the SSH level.

mkdir ~/net/remote.example.com
sshfs -C remote.example.com:/ ~/net/remote.example.com
tar -czf foo.tgz -C ~/net/remote.example.com/path/to/directory foo

Related Solutions

Wget – How to Download a File to a Remote Machine Over SSH

So you are logged into a machine myclient and have ssh access to another machine myserver. You want to download a file over HTTP from a remove server www.example.com to myclient but the data needs to be saved on myserver. This should do it:

wget -O - http://www.example.com/whatever | ssh myserver 'cat >/path/to/remote/destination'

Alternatively, you could mount the myserver's filesystem over SSH with sshfs. This may be too much hassle for a one-off need, but convenient if you do this sort of thing often.

mkdir ~/myserver
sshfs myserver:/ ~/myserver
wget -O ~/myserver/path/to/remote/destination http://www.example.com/whatever

Best Answer

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Wget – How to Download a File to a Remote Machine Over SSH

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