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 );
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