Published

Today I learned how to use tar over ssh to save hours in file transfers. I keep all of my projects in ~/git (very creative I know, I’ve done it for years and haven’t changed). I just swapped out my main desktop from bazzite to hyprland, and wanted to get all of my projects back. Before killing my bazzite install I moved everything over (16GB of many small files), it took over 14 hours, maybe longer. I had started in the morning and just let it churn.

This was not going to happen for re-seeding all of my projects on my new system, I knew there had to be a better way, I looked at rsync, but for seeding I ran into this tar over ssh technique and it only took me 6m51s to pull all of my projects off of my remote server.

ssh [email protected] 'tar -C /tank/git -cpf - .' \
  | tar -C "$HOME/git" -xpf -

I’ve been leaning on lazy-self-installing-python-scripts more and more, but I did not realize how much tooling that uv gives you to help manage your scripts.

uv init --script up
uv add --script up typer rich
uv remove --script up rich
sed -i '1i #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script' up
chmod +x up
./up

The result is a script that looks like this, its executable as what looks like regular command in your shell.

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.13"
# dependencies = [
#     "typer",
# ]
# ///


def main() -> None:
    print("Hello from up!")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()