Copying files with netcat

Sometimes it happens that you can't use ftp,scp,rsh,etc... to copy many files from a machine to another one through the net. It happened often to me copying file from Unix boxes to Linux boxes.

In these cases netcat comes to help us:

Linux box (192.168.1.1) listening on port 9999 and piping input to tar:

[matte@mOrDoR ~]$ nc -v -l -p 9999 | tar xv

Unix box (DIR is the directory we want to copy) "tarring" the directory and piping output to netcat:

# tar cf - DIR | nc -h192.168.1.1 -p9999