Using netcat and tar to quickly transfer files between machines, aka tar pipe
So you have gigs of data to transfer between two machines over ethernet. A nice quick and dirty method is to use netcat and tar. This is by no means secure, but if you haven't got the time or desire to setup NFS, FTPd, Samba. Or wait hours for scp to do it's job then this can save you a lot of time.
Linux System using tar and netcat
On the receiving end do: # netcat -l -p 7000 |tar x
And on the sending end do: # tar cf - * | netcat otherhost 7000 Notes
Depending on your hardware you might want to use compression with tar. You'll probably find your hard disk drive is a bottleneck on a fast network. Compression is useless if you can't saturate your network and will probably just slow things down. tar cf - * is copy everything in the current working directory. And your files will be untared at the other end from where you started the listening netcat. It won't be obivous that the operation is finished so you'll need to check network activityor top. This is indeedquick and dirty.