Copy Files via Shell

Read time < 1 minute

Maybe you are limited and have no SFTP client available or just want a simple fast way to copy some config files from a server.

All the tools you need are already installed.

To backup the current directory

find . | tar cPf - --files-from - | gzip -9 | base64

It returns your files compressed and encoded as base64 with owner mappings and file permissions.

You can adjust find to copy specific files even recursively.

To restore them

cat << 'EOF' | base64 -d | zcat | tar xvPf -
BASE64
EOF