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

sshwget

I'd like to basically pipe a wget command to a file on a remote server over SSH. How can I do this? I know I could simply ssh into the server and have it download the file, but I'd much rather use the local machine to download it and send it.

Best Answer

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

Related Solutions

SSH to untrusted machine

It is not possible for them to simply hijack your connection and take over your PC simply because you used SSH to connect to their remote server. However, everything you do on that remote server can certainly be monitored. Any passwords you might type in through the remote SSH connection can be captured, but that's because you are sending that data to them, not because they are monitoring your home computer. If they hijack your PTS session, they can do nothing more than you can on their own remote server. It gains them nothing as they already have that much power over their own server. If they type exit, they will end your remote shell and you will be booted off, but they won't gain any control over your computer. That PTS session was on the remote computer and has nothing to do with any PTS sessions you might have on your home computer. There is always a chance there could be a security exploit in your SSH client that might give them some access to your machine, but if your keep your software reasonably up to date, it's extremely unlikely and I wouldn't worry about it.

With that said, there are ways to make you computer more vulnerable with SSH. If you enable certain type of forwarding, they might be able to use that against you. All forwarding is off by default. If you have agent forwarding enabled, they can use any private keys you have loaded in your agent on your home computer but only while the SSH connection is established. An agent does not allow anyone to steal keys, but they can use them as long as you are forwarding it to their server. You should never enable agent forwarding to an untrusted computer. X11 forwarding can allow them to launch applications and even take control of your X session. OpenSSH, by default does some filtering of the X11 protocol when forwarding (unless you have ForwardX11Trusted enabled) and so they can't take over complete control, but they can still load windows on your X session. Again, X11 forwarding needs to be used cautiously.

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

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

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Related Solutions

SSH to untrusted machine

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

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