How to wget a file to a remote machine over SSH?

Question

I'd like to basically pipe a wget command to a file on a remote server over SSH. How can I do this? I know I could simply ssh into the server and have it download the file, but I'd much rather use the local machine to download it and send it.

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly (it's not clear what machine is supposed to do what), you are logged into some machine myclient, you have ssh access to another machine myserver, and you want to download a file over HTTP from a remove server www.example.com, with the requirement that the HTTP download must be performed to myclient but the data needs to be saved on myserver. Then:

wget -O - http://www.example.com/whatever | ssh myserver 'cat >/path/to/remote/destination'

Another approach is to mount the remote server's filesystem over SSH, with sshfs. This is too much hassle for a once-off need, but convenient if you do that sort of things often.

mkdir ~/myserver
sshfs myserver:/ ~/myserver
wget -O ~/myserver/path/to/remote/destination http://www.example.com/whatever