I decided to make a simple, general-purpose command line utility out of it, because I actually do this sort of transfer often enough myself to make it worthwhile (now I don't have to remember to put in all those parens, etc, on the command line).

update: added more error checking and support for the "-l username" ssh option; also allow for "$src_path" to be empty (i.e., in login user's home directory).

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Program:    ssh-tar.perl
# Written by:    dave graff
# Purpose:    make it easy to tar from remote-host to local-host

use strict;

my $Usage = "Usage: $0 hostname [-l username] path-to-tar local-dir-to
+-save-to\n";

my $ssh_user = "";
if ( @ARGV > 2 && $ARGV[0] eq "-l" ) {
    $ssh_user = "$ARGV[0] $ARGV[1]";
    shift;
    shift;
}
die $Usage unless ( @ARGV == 3 and -d $ARGV[2] and -w $ARGV[2] );

my $local_path = pop;
chdir $local_path or die "can't chdir to $local_path: $!\n";

my $src_host = $ARGV[0];
my $divide = rindex( $ARGV[1], "/" );
my $src_path = ( $divide < 0 ) ? "" : substr( $ARGV[1], 0, $divide );
my $src_targ = substr( $ARGV[1], $divide +1 );

my $cmd = "ssh $ssh_user $src_host 'cd $src_path && tar cf - $src_targ
+' | tar xf -";
print "command line is:\n\n $cmd\n\n";

system( $cmd );
[download]

Thank you very very much :) I appreciate your answer!!!

I think it is an excellent utility. I was able to tar from 
the $src_host , however just when the job is about done.
I got the following error. 

tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

and if I did 

system( $cmd ) == 0 or die "tar failed"

I always got the tar failed and die.
Do you have any idea why?

thanks!

You may need to be careful about which version of tar is running on the remote host, and which version is running locally. If they're different (e.g. remote host uses a native solaris version, localhost uses gnu version, or whatever), this might cause the sort of problem you observed.

Apart from that, does the local host get most of the content that you were hoping for? Can you isolate the particular file(s) that didn't get unpacked locally? (If, God forbid, one of the machines involved is using Microsoft text-mode semantics on the data transfer, that is bound to kill it prematurely.)

tar -cf - <files> | (cd <target dir> ; tar -xvf - );
[download]