4 ms·

$ 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.