How to execute a remote command and pass in local file as input?

Is it possible to do this:

ssh [email protected] command /path/to/file/on/local/machine

That is to say, I want to execute a remote command using a local file in one step, without first using scp to copy the file.

Answers:

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Method 1

You missed just one symbol =)

ssh <a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="146167716654677b777f7160">[email protected]</a> command < /path/to/file/on/local/machine

Method 2

One way that works regardless of the command is to make the file available on the remote machine via a remote filesystem. Since you have an SSH connection:

1. Establish a reverse SSH tunnel. See also SSH easily copy file to local system
2. Mount a directory tree of your machine containing the file to share on the remote machine with SSHFS. (Example)

Method 3

# What if remote command can only take a file argument and not read from stdin? (1_CR)
ssh <a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="7702041205370418141c1203">[email protected]</a> command < /path/to/file/on/local/machine
...
cat test.file | ssh <a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="d6a3a5b3a496bbb7b5bebfb8b3">[email protected]</a> 'bash -c "wc -l <(cat -)"'  # 1_CR

As an alternative to bash process substitution <(cat -) or < <(xargs -0 -n 1000 cat) (see below) you can just use xargs and cat to pipe the contents of the specified files to wc -l (which is more portable).

# Assuming that test.file contains file paths each delimited by an ASCII NUL character 
# and that we are to count all those lines in all those files (provided by test.file).

#find . -type f -print0 > test.file
# test with repeated line count of ~/.bash_history file
for n in {1..1000}; do printf '%s00' "${HOME}/.bash_history"; done > test.file

# xargs & cat
ssh localhost 'export LC_ALL=C; xargs -0 -n 1000 cat | wc -l' <test.file

# Bash process substitution
cat test.file | ssh localhost 'bash -c "export LC_ALL=C; wc -l < <(xargs -0 -n 1000 cat)"'

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0