Linux: How to compress data in a remote server and save them locally in one command!
One of the most common tasks of a system administrator is to compress some files in a remote server and then move them to another server…
One of the most common tasks of a system administrator is to compress some files in a remote server and then move them to another server, either for backup or data processing. Its relatively a simple operation but it has two pitfalls
- Remote server might ran out of disk space during compression
- Needs extra commands to download and delete the compressed file
Usually the procedure is like thisssh server1 'tar -czvf compressed_file.tar.gz /dir/to/compress'
scp server1 'compressed_file.tar.gz' .
ssh server1 'rm compressed_file.tar.gz'
We can simplify the whole procedure and plus eliminate the danger to run out of disk space in the remote server by using the following command.ssh -q server1 "tar -czpf - /dir/to/compress 2>/dev/null" > compressed_file.tgz
How it works
- -q : ssh will not show banners, this is needed in order not to write those messages to the compressed data which will corrupt the archive.
- -czpf : various compression options.
- - : this is needed in order not to write the compressed data to a file but to the terminal.
- 2>/dev/null : this is needed in order not to write warnings / errors to the terminal along with the compressed data which will corrupt the archive.
- > compressed_file.tgz : the file name in the local computer to save the remote server compressed data from its terminal.
I hope you found this article useful :)
