Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Compressing, Encrypting, and Sending tar Streams

The file copy techniques using the tar command in the previous section can also be used to quickly and securely copy a directory structure across a LAN or the Internet (using the ssh command). One way to make use of these techniques is to use the following command line to first compress the contents of a designated directory and then decompress the compressed and encrypted archive stream into a designated directory on a remote host:

matthew@seymour:~$ tar -cvzf data_folder | ssh remote_host '( cd ~/mybackup_dir; tar -xvzf )'

The tar command is used to create, list, and compress the files in the directory named data_folder. The output is piped through the ssh (Secure Shell) command and sent to the ...