Re: [Bug-tar] network support built in to gtar..

[Doug McLaren]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 06:19:24PM -0400, Brent Verner wrote:

| I've had a little netcat/tar piping script that I've found _very_ useful,
| which leads me to the question: Would it make sense to build network support
| directly into gnu tar?  I think it would be really nice to say something
| like this...

tar already has networking support installed.  It's been there for
many many years.

   tar -cvvvf host:/dev/tapedrive foo ...

will use the tape drive on the remote host.  You can also use
address@hidden instead of just host.

Behind the scenes, it uses rsh to the remote host, then invokes rmt on
the remote end to create the file or talk to the tape drive.

By using the the --rsh-command=/usr/bin/ssh (or whatever) option you
can tell it to use ssh rather than rsh, which should just work.  ssh
can even prompt you for a password if needed.

If rmt is in a non-standard location on the remote machine, the
--rmt-command= command will let you specify it.

The info page on tar has more information on this, though you probably
have enough here to make it work.

As for your idea of adding further support to tar, there's a lot of
security concerns to think about before adding something like that.  I
suspect the developers won't want to change how it works now.

-- 
Doug McLaren, address@hidden
`It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat
 everything as if it were a nail.' - Abraham Maslow