Pipe data onto another machine with nologin

Question

I have a huge directory I want to copy to another machine as a .tar.gz file. I don't have a lot of space on either machine, so I'd like to copy the file through a pipe, like this:

tar -czf - mydirectory | ssh other.machine.science "cat > file/location/myfile.tar.gz"

The computer I'm logging in to has my shell set to nologin, though, as I am only allowed to copy files on and off of it with scp.

How can I copy a file from a pipe to a system where I don't have shell access?

Answer 1

You could just use scp -r to copy your local directory recursively. This will use more space on the remote end than a compressed tar file, but there seems to be little point in copying such a file without the ability to extract it.

scp -r mydirectory other.machine.science:/path/to/newdirectory