Extracting certain files from a tar archive on a remote ssh server - bash

Question

I am running numerous simulations on a remote server (via ssh). The outcomes of these simulations are stored as .tar archives in an archive directory on this remote server.
What I would like to do, is write a bash script which connects to the remote server via ssh and extracts the required output files from each .tar archive into separate folders on my local hard drive.
These folders should have the same name as the .tar file from which the files come (To give an example, say the output of simulation 1 is stored in the archive S1.tar on the remote server, I want all '.dat' and '.def' files within this .tar archive to be extracted to a directory S1 on my local drive).
For the extraction itself, I was trying:
for f in *.tar; do
(
mkdir ../${f%.tar}
tar -x -f "$f" -C ../${f%.tar} "*.dat" "*.def"
)
done
wait
Every .tar file is around 1GB and there is a lot of them. So downloading everything takes too much time, which is why I only want to extract the necessary files (see the extensions in the code above).
Now the code works perfectly when I have the .tar files on my local drive. However, what I can't figure out is how I can do it without first having to download all the .tar archives from the server.
When I first connect to the remote server via ssh username#host, then the terminal stops with the script and just connects to the server.
Btw I am doing this in VS Code and running the script through terminal on my MacBook.
I hope I have described it clear enough. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Stream the results of tar back with filenames via SSH
To get the data you wish to retrieve from .tar files, you'll need to pass the results of tar to a string of commands with the --to-command option. In the example below, we'll run three commands.
# Send the files name back to your shell
echo $TAR_FILENAME
# Send the contents of the file back
cat /dev/stdin
# Send EOF (Ctrl+d) back (note: since we're already in a $'' we don't use the $ again)
echo '\004'
Once the information is captured in your shell, we can start to process the data. This is a three-step process.
Get the file's name
note that, in this code, we aren't handling directories at all (simply stripping them away; i.e. dir/1.dat -> 1.dat)
you can write code to create directories for the file by replacing the forward slashes / with spaces and iterating over each directory name but that seems out-of-scope for this.
Check for the EOF (end-of-file)
Add content to file
# Get the files via ssh and tar
files=$(ssh -n <user#server> $'tar -xf <tar-file> --wildcards \'*\' --to-command=$\'echo $TAR_FILENAME; cat /dev/stdin; echo \'\004\'\'')
# Keeps track of what state we're in (filename or content)
state="filename"
filename=""
# Each line is one of these:
# - file's name
# - file's data
# - EOF
while read line; do
if [[ $state == "filename" ]]; then
filename=${line/*\//}
touch $filename
echo "Copying: $filename"
state="content"
elif [[ $state == "content" ]]; then
# look for EOF (ctrl+d)
if [[ $line == $'\004' ]]; then
filename=""
state="filename"
else
# append data to file
echo $line >> <output-folder>/$filename
fi
fi
# Double quotes here are very important
done < <(echo -e "$files")
Alternative: tar + scp
If the above example seems overly complex for what it's doing, it is. An alternative that touches the disk more and requires to separate ssh connections would be to extract the files you need from your .tar file to a folder and scp that folder back to your workstation.
ssh -n <username>#<server> 'mkdir output/; tar -C output/ -xf <tar-file> --wildcards *.dat *.def'
scp -r <username>#<server>:output/ ./
The breakdown
First, we'll make a place to keep our outputted files. You can skip this if you already know the folder they'll be in.
mkdir output/
Then, we'll extract the matching files to this folder we created (if you don't want them to be in a different folder remove the -C output/ option).
tar -C output/ -xf <tar-file> --wildcards *.dat *.def
Lastly, now that we're running commands on our machine again, we can run scp to reconnect to the remote machine and pull the files back.
scp -r <username>#<server>:output/ ./