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Life & fun · January 4, 2025

An SSH based utility to transfer pipes across machines – beam

Hey HN, At work, I was annoyed about having to download logs by writing them out to files and transferring them over to my local over HTTP (admittedly, this is because of a rather novel architectural situation). So, I built a tool in Go that lets you pipe contents into an SSH server for sending and reading them out on another connection. You can also use this tool to transfer files. Just cat the file on the sender end and redirect the output of the receiver end to a file. Please note that the transfer rate is heavily dependent on your connection and proximity to the public ssh.beam.camp…

An SSH based utility to transfer pipes across machines – beam launched on January 4, 2025 with 28 votes, #597 of 6,142 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 10% of January 2025

In plain words

Beam is an SSH-based utility written in Go that enables transferring piped data and files between machines without creating intermediate files. Users pipe content into an SSH server on one connection and read it out on another, simplifying workflows for sharing logs and other data across systems. It works by piping file contents directly between sender and receiver endpoints, eliminating the need for manual file downloads or HTTP transfers.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

transfer pipes and files from one computer to another over ssh - GitHub - ksdme/beam: transfer pipes and files from one computer to another over ssh

Beam is essentially a special purpose SSH server. All it does is receive information on one connection and forwards it to another. This allows you to use Beam as a simple broker for streams over SSH. You can use it to transfer pipes, files and more. echo hello | ssh beam.ssh.camp send And, then, on the receiver end start reading the contents out using, ssh beam.ssh.camp receive --progress By default, Beam identifies your session using your public key. So, if you are using the same SSH keys on both the sender and the receiver end, you do not need to use an explicit channel name. When the same key isn't available on both the machines, you can use a random channel name. You can do this using,…from github.com

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hey HN, At work, I was annoyed about having to download logs by writing them out to files and transferring them over to my local over HTTP (admittedly, this is because of a rather novel architectural situation). So, I built a tool in Go that lets you pipe contents into an SSH server for sending and reading them out…

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