Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local machine

Terminal - Copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local machine
ssh user@host "(cd /path/to/remote/top/dir ; tar cvf - ./*)" | tar xvf -
2009-03-31 13:08:45
User: dopeman
Functions: ssh tar
1
Up
Down
Copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local machine

This command will copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local one.

Ensure you are in the local directory you want to populate with the remote files before running the command.

To copy a directory and it's contents, you could:

ssh user@host "(cd /path/to/a/directory ; tar cvf - ./targetdir)" | tar xvf -

This is especially useful on *nix'es that don't have 'scp' installed by default.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

rsync -av user@host:/path/to/remote/top/dir /path/to/local/top/dir

you can interrupt, resume, exclude: exclude="*/temp/*", --progress to watch, -n to test (dry run) and a ton more options. add "-z" for compression. rsync is ssh by default for a few years, see man pages for older versions

Comment by kalak 216 weeks and 3 days ago
rsync -av user@host:/path/to/remote/top/dir /path/to/local/top/dir

you can interrupt, resume, exclude: exclude="*/temp/*", --progress to watch, -n to test (dry run) and a ton more options. add "-z" for compression. rsync is ssh by default for a few years, see man pages for older versions

Comment by kalak 216 weeks and 3 days ago

My experience is that rsync and 'ssh user@host tar | tar -' are about the same in performance if you're just copying an entire path from scratch. I type the 'ssh tar | tar -' version more often though because a simple modification allows archival if you don't want to untar:

ssh user@host "cd targdir; tar cf - ./*" > host_targdir.tar
Comment by bwoodacre 216 weeks and 3 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts