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Pipe Viewer – A Unix Utility You Should Know About

(catonmat.net)
236 points lnyan | 3 comments | 20 Nov 24 15:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.641s | source
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emptiestplace ◴[20 Nov 24 19:28 UTC] No.42197265[source]▶
> The obvious way to do it is:

> $ gzip -c access.log > access.log.gz

Is it?

replies(1): >>42199308 #
zoky ◴[20 Nov 24 23:36 UTC] No.42199308[source]▶
I mean, if you’re the type of person who considers using tar and nc to be the obvious way to transfer a directory between two computers…
replies(1): >>42200575 #
vbezhenar ◴[21 Nov 24 02:44 UTC] No.42200575[source]▶
I might be weird, but for me the most obvious way to transfer a small directory is to do

    tar -cz dir | base64
Copy output into clipboard

    base64 -d | tar -xz
Paste from clipboard into input

Works flawlessly to move configs and stuff between servers.

I actually love the blend between terminal and GUI. For this example I'm using CLI tools to produce text and I'm using GUI to scroll, select and copy&paste the text between two terminal tabs. I wish developers put more emphasis on empowering terminal with GUI capabilities.

replies(2): >>42201381 #>>42201805 #
Towaway69 ◴[21 Nov 24 06:53 UTC] No.42201805[source]▶
On Mac you can use pbcopy to copy something your pasteboard aka clipboard.

So the first command becomes:

   tar -cz dir | base64 | pbcopy
replies(1): >>42203701 #
1. zoky ◴[21 Nov 24 12:34 UTC] No.42203701[source]▶
And of course you can use pbpaste for the inverse. Doesn’t work over SSH though, which is almost certainly how you’d be using this.
replies(1): >>42206139 #
2. Towaway69 ◴[21 Nov 24 16:47 UTC] No.42206139[source]▶
True that unless ssh tunnels the pasteboard nowadays ;)

GP was doing this using GUI and TUI so it's a case of having two terminals open to two different machines I assume.

replies(1): >>42209190 #
3. zoky ◴[21 Nov 24 22:09 UTC] No.42209190[source]▶
> GP was doing this using GUI and TUI so it's a case of having two terminals open to two different machines I assume.

Yeah, but that’s exactly the case where it won’t work. pbcopy and pbpaste run locally, so if you’re connected to a remote Mac they won’t work properly (they will just cut/paste to the remote machine’s local pasteboard), and if you’re connected to a non-Mac the commands won’t exist at all. The only case where they would work is, say, connecting from one Mac to another via something like VNC that does do pasteboard sharing, and you’re trying to copy a file structure from a remote system to a local one. If you’ve got two terminal windows open to two different machines, you’ll have to cut and paste manually.