Did you ever suddenly notice that something simple you've been doing for years could be vastly improved with just a little bit of tweaking? I did yesterday concerning the transfer of files with netcat (e.g. when nobody got sendfile installed and standard paranoia forbids simply using scp instead) and figured I should share my sudden “enlightenment”

#!/bin/sh
 
host=$1
shift
 
tar cv "$@" | pv -brt | nc -q0 $host 23000

#!/bin/sh
 
netcat -l -p 23000 | pv -brt | tar xv

Note: piping to pv is optional

Edit: fixed a word splitting bug and specified a default port