> When I've had this need, I end up kludging something with tar and
> netcat on both ends, but it's not very satisfactory, especially since
> netcat's semantics combine the idea of timeouts with exitting when
> the connection closes (i.e. "-w secs").

Surely the correct response here is "then you need a better netcat"?

See ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca:/mouse/local/src/nc/ for the one I use,
which doesn't have anything of the sort as far as I can tell (though
I'm not sure what timeouts you're talking about, so I'm not sure).
I've certainly had no problem using it for exactly this sort of bulk
data transfer.

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