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shantanuo
Asked: 2011-09-28 23:01:28 +0800 CST

Copy directory using ssh tunnel

  • 772

The following command is working as expected.

ssh [email protected] "ssh [email protected] 'cat test.txt'" > /home/shantanu/test.txt

What I need to do is to copy the entire directory instead of a single file.

Is it possible to use rync with SSH tunneling?

ssh ssh-tunnel ssh-keys

4 Answers

  1. You can use scp to copy single or multiple files and also use rsync with an ssh transport: 

    scp -r localdirectoryname username@hostname:/remotepath

    and

    rsync -av localdirectory username@hostname:/remotepath

    Both programs also work the other way round, with the remote part as the origin and the local as the destination.

    See man scp and man rsync.

    Edit

    If you indeed need an intermediate server, you could use ssh port forwarding:

    In one shell, use this command to establish a port forwarding: 

    ssh -NL 10022:10.199.199.91:22 [email protected]

    This connects port 10022 on your local machine with port 22 on 10.199.199.91, but won't open a shell, instead just blocks until you terminate it.

    Afterwards, on another shell/xterm, you can use either 

    scp -r -P 10022 localpath soak@localhost:/remotepath

    but have to be aware that soak@localhost actually points to [email protected] when entering your credentials.

    Edit 2, now featuring rsync

    As you specifically asked about rsync, here is how to use rsync instead of scp. It requires the same port forwarding enabled as the scp variant: 

    rsync -av --rsh="ssh -p 10022" localpath soak@localhost:/remotepath

    and again remember that you are actually connecting to [email protected].

    • 6
  2. Best Answer

    You could pipe tar.

    eg.

    ssh [email protected] "ssh [email protected] 'tar cf - test_directory'" | tar xf -
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  3. Another way is use SSH Port Forwarding.

    First, run the following command on your computer:

    $ ssh -N -f -L 2302:10.199.199.191:22 [email protected]

    This allocated a socket to listen to port 2302 on localhost. Whenever a connection connect to this port, it will be forwarded to 10.199.199.191:22.

    So you can copy a folder on 10.199.199.191 to your machine with:

    $ scp -r -P 2302 soak@localhost:/path/to/folder /path/to/destination/dir
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  4. Also available is ssh's ProxyCommand.

    From Undeadly:

    Host internal.hostname.tld internal
  User          merdely
  HostName      internal.hostname.tld
  ProxyCommand  ssh [email protected] nc %h %p 2> /dev/null
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