Luke Davis writes: > Hmm. If I recall correctly, tar can save files on remote hosts. > > How does it accomplish this? > (not "how do you do it", but "how does it work".) It turns out to be disarmingly simple. tar can read and write std io. I always thought that was a strange feature. I don't think that anymore. Turns out this stuff is as old as the hills. Until I started looking at books from BookShare, I was Googling. Amazing. The files I pulled up were old "Introduction to the Internet" kinds of things from the early 1990's. It was rather fun seeing those old html 2.0 files again. They were really so much more blind friendly back in the days before the nav bar was invented to our detriment. But, I diagress. It seems the original purpose was to access a tape mechanism on a remote server. Makes sense. Tape drives are expensive. You wouldn't have one per machine. So, the missing app in my earlier attempt to write tar output to HOSTNAME:test.tgz would have been rmt. Indeed, I also found this little gem on line: tar cf - filename | ssh -l userid hostname 'dd of=/dev/tape' The comment accompanying said "This works under SGI Irix and OpenSSH, and should under Linux." Last point, the ssh part is also pretty impressive. If you don't have it, get the ssh book from BookShare and look at Chapter 9, the chapter on port forwarding. Seems one can direct any kind of process as long as it's tcp. udp won't work, but tcp will. >
