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Sftp is also not that great. To transfer a folder with children you have to create an empty folder of the same name on the server. Only then you can transfer th

Sftp is also not that great. To transfer a folder with children you have to create an empty folder of the same name on the server. Only then you can transfer the client folder, but it doesn't go into the server folder of the same name. Perhaps stack overflow was just entirely incorrect, but that's how I've had to do it with limited systems in the past.

mzs 5y ago
$ tar cf - foo bar | ssh user@host tar -C baz -xvf -
- chasil 5y ago
  That can bite you if the remote tar allows absolute paths.
- loxias 5y ago
  high five It truly is the best, no? My pipelines look a bit different than yours (they usually have `lzop`/`zstd`, `cd`, and occasionally `pv`), but tar truly is the best file copy utility. I rarely use `cp -a` even when copying locally. `tar` is so much faster.
  - spockz 5y ago
    Then why isn’t cp-a and alias for tar?
    - loxias 5y ago
      Because that's not how you use it. :) But you raise a decent point. I'll write a short script you could alias to cp in most cases, put it somewhere, and edit this comment in a day with a link.
- technofiend 5y ago
  I use this locally as well, simply because I know and prefer tar's behavior to that of cp. For example tar cf - . | (cd /some/where/else; tar xvf -). It's possible to do this using cpio as well but it always seemed like cpio needed so many more switches to do the same thing.
xioxox 5y ago
You can also use lftp to transfer a directory tree using the sftp protocol: $ lftp sftp://hostname lftp ~> cd somedir lftp ~> mirror . lftp ~> quit