Compressing files from SCP on the fly

Question

I am retrieving a large files using SCP (from a linux system to a Windows system), now is there any way of compressing that destination file on the fly, for example:

pscp -C root@123.123.123.123:/backups/backup1.bin Backups\backupdestination.bin

So "backupdestination.bin" would be compressed on the destination drive on the fly.

e.g. C:\backups\backupdestination.zip rather than C:\backups\backupdestination.bin

Answer 1

I would suggest rsync, since it has a built in compression flag.

From the rsync man page (http://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync):

-z, --compress              compress file data during the transfer
 --compress-level=NUM    explicitly set compression level

Answer 2

Don't use scp, use ssh :)

The target machine can then "catch" the data. For your example:

ssh root@123.123.123.123 "cat /backups/backup1.bin"|gzip -9 -|Backups\backupdestination.bin

This whole scheme will work with anything that can take a contiguous stream of data from stdin and then process it. I'm not aware - off-hand - of a tool that creates ZIP files this way, though. In particular because ZIP files contain the meta-data such as file name and timestamp.