Kermit command line to fetch remote files through ssh

I previously wrote about Kermit for fetching remote files using a kermit script. I found that it’s possible to achieve the same with a single kermit command, without requiring a script file.

Given I want to download files from my remote server from the path /home/mirror/pub and that I’ve setup a kermit server on the other part using inetd:

File /etc/inetd.conf:

7878 stream tcp nowait solene /usr/local/bin/kermit-sshsub kermit-sshsub

I can make a ssh tunnel to it to reach it locally on port 7878 to download my files.

kermit -I -j localhost:7878 -C "remote cd /home/mirror/pub","reget /recursive .",close,EXIT

Some flags can be added to make it even faster, like -v 31 -e 9042. I insist on kermit because it’s super reliable and there are no security issues if running behind a firewall and accessed through ssh.

Fetching files can be stopped at any time, it supports very poor connection too, it’s really reliable. You can also skip files, because sometimes you need some file first and you don’t want to modify your script to fetch a specific file (this only works if you don’t have too many files to get of course because you can skip them only one by one).