The following works for me. (I just have to answer ssh's "password:" prompt on my local keyboard, 'cuz I don't have those nifty ssh keys for the hosts I connect to from home, but that's no problem.)

I decided to make a simple, general-purpose command line utility out of it, because I actually do this sort of transfer often enough myself to make it worthwhile (now I don't have to remember to put in all those parens, etc, on the command line).

update: added more error checking and support for the "-l username" ssh option; also allow for "$src_path" to be empty (i.e., in login user's home directory).

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Program:    ssh-tar.perl
# Written by:    dave graff
# Purpose:    make it easy to tar from remote-host to local-host

use strict;

my $Usage = "Usage: $0 hostname [-l username] path-to-tar local-dir-to
+-save-to\n";

my $ssh_user = "";
if ( @ARGV > 2 && $ARGV[0] eq "-l" ) {
    $ssh_user = "$ARGV[0] $ARGV[1]";
    shift;
    shift;
}
die $Usage unless ( @ARGV == 3 and -d $ARGV[2] and -w $ARGV[2] );

my $local_path = pop;
chdir $local_path or die "can't chdir to $local_path: $!\n";

my $src_host = $ARGV[0];
my $divide = rindex( $ARGV[1], "/" );
my $src_path = ( $divide < 0 ) ? "" : substr( $ARGV[1], 0, $divide );
my $src_targ = substr( $ARGV[1], $divide +1 );

my $cmd = "ssh $ssh_user $src_host 'cd $src_path && tar cf - $src_targ
+' | tar xf -";
print "command line is:\n\n $cmd\n\n";

system( $cmd );
[download]