UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Our group has recently inherited 15 servers that have not been maintained for over a year.
My first action is to backup the units however there is not enough disk space on most of them to run tar. My supervisor said to look at piping the tar output to another machine, however I have been unable to get this to work.
I tried the command below
tar -cv test.tar acc/ - | ssh user@sport:/home/user/temp/
but I get the error message Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.

I could use some help getting started on this since I dont know where to go from here.
Links to appropriate reading would also be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

You've almost got the command. You have forgotten to use tar on the other side of the ssh and the tar on the local server has some problems as well. Here you go:

Code:

tar -cf - acc/ | ssh user@sport (cd /home/user/temp; tar -xf - )

You can stick a 'v' in the tar command if you want verbose output.

Thanks Blowtorch. I've got a question on the command you show. Why is the tar -xf - needed? Since I dont want to untar the file on the server as it is going to be written to a tape should the command be
tar -cf - acc/ | ssh user@sport (cd /home/user/temp )

Also, I've also come across the netcat command and it looks like it might work equally well. Is there any advantage to using either netcat or ssh?

Thanks for the help.

Oh, OK. My mistake. I thought this was a simple transfer of files thing. Can you try this command instead?

Code:

tar -cf - *|ssh -l remote_user remote_host cd /some/tmp/dir\; tar -xf -\;tar -cf /path/to/tape \*