Comment by zoky

4 days ago

I mean, if you’re the type of person who considers using tar and nc to be the obvious way to transfer a directory between two computers…

6 comments

zoky

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vbezhenar  3 days ago

I might be weird, but for me the most obvious way to transfer a small directory is to do

    tar -cz dir | base64

Copy output into clipboard

    base64 -d | tar -xz

Paste from clipboard into input

Works flawlessly to move configs and stuff between servers.

I actually love the blend between terminal and GUI. For this example I'm using CLI tools to produce text and I'm using GUI to scroll, select and copy&paste the text between two terminal tabs. I wish developers put more emphasis on empowering terminal with GUI capabilities.

  • Towaway69  3 days ago

    On Mac you can use pbcopy to copy something your pasteboard aka clipboard.

    So the first command becomes:

       tar -cz dir | base64 | pbcopy

    • zoky  3 days ago

      And of course you can use pbpaste for the inverse. Doesn’t work over SSH though, which is almost certainly how you’d be using this.

      2 replies →

  • zoky  3 days ago

    Under certain circumstances, like where machines are not directly accessible to each other and you’re only able to connect by Remote Desktop or something, that’s not actually bad way to do that. But for machines that are on the same network, using a weird invocation of tar and nc instead of just using, say, rsync is an odd choice. And for machines connected to each other over the Internet, it’s positively insane.