I've successfully managed to transfer a tar file over SSH on stdout from a remote system, creating a compressed file locally, by doing something like this:

read -s sudopass
ssh me@remote "echo $sudopass | sudo -S tar cf - '/dir'" 2>/dev/null | XZ_OPT='-6 -T0 -v' xz > dir.tar.xz

As expected this gets me a dir.tar.xz locally which is all of the remote /dir compressed.

I've also managed to figure out how to locally only compress a subset of files, by passing a filelist to tar with -T on STDIN:

find '/dir' -name '*.log' | XZ_OPT='-6 -T0 -v' tar cJvf /root/logs.txz -T -

My main question is: how would I go about doing the first thing (transfer plain tar remotly, then compress locally) while at the same time telling tar that I only want to do it on a specific subset of files?

When I try combining the two:

ssh me@remote "echo $sudopass | sudo -S find '/dir' -name '*.log' | tar cf
-T -" | XZ_OPT='-6 -T0 -v' xz > cypress_logs.tar.xz

I get errors like:

tar: -: Cannot stat: No such file or directory

I feel like tar isn't liking the fact that I'm both passing it something on STDIN as well as expecting it to output to STDOUT. Adding another - didn't seem to help either.

Also, as a bonus question, if anyone has a better idea on how to pass $sudopass above that would be great, since this method -- while avoiding having the password in the bash history -- makes the sudo password show up in the process list while it's running.

CodePudding user response：

Remember that the f option requires an argument, so when you write cf -T -, I suspect that the -T is getting consumed as the argument to f, which throws off the rest of the command line.

This works for me:

ssh me@remote "echo $password | sudo -S find /tmp/dir -name '*.log' | tar -cf- -T-"

You could also write it like this:

ssh me@remote "echo $password | sudo -S find /tmp/dir -name '*.log' | tar cf - -T-"

But I prefer to always use - for options, rather than legacy tar's weird options without any prefix.