Good morning everyone and happy MonDEV! ☕
how is development going in this almost summer? Here we continue to write lines of code and look for new tools to talk about, even though soon your Monday newsletter will go on vacation for a few weeks, before coming back more charged than before!
But there's still some time left, so why not come to today's tool instead?
Today we talk about file transfer. How many times do we have to quickly pass one or more files from one PC to another?
What is the first method you use? USB stick? Cloud/Drive maybe? What's App or Telegram Web?
Regardless of your tool of choice, this forces us to interrupt our workflow and the comfortable environment.
As I have said in other cases, it is not something transcendental, but if we can always do better, why not do it?
So I present to you Croc, today's tool.
What is it about? Well, Croc is a tool that allows two computers to exchange files securely directly from the command line. It is available for any operating system, very lightweight, and very easy to use.
Once installed, in fact, you just need to launch the command croc ./file-name.ext from the terminal and croc will release a passphrase to you; by launching croc from any other pc and entering the same phrase, you can immediately download the file.
The download is available only once so the use of the passphrase is unique, and you can use the one generated or choose one yourself.
In this way, without leaving the terminal, you will have transferred your files from one pc to another in a few seconds.
As I said, perhaps it won't revolutionize your way of working, but I find that small details are sometimes what makes the difference.
That being said, there are many more options that you can set, and I invite you to discover them directly on the tool's repository.
I hope this little insight of the week can be interesting for you, as always let me know!
In the meantime, I just have to wish you a good week.
Happy Coding 0_1
Top comments (5)
My first thought was, "why not rsync?" but then I read further.
This looks like a nice little tool - one question though, is the transfer always through the relay server or can it go direct if both machines are directly connectable? I have immediate concerns about privacy!
EDIT: I read the bit about PAKE, so that's good.
Yeah you anticipated me on that!
I'm really happy you appreciate it, I really found it useful in order to allow straightforward file transfer also between 2 of my computers for example.
It's pretty small and easy to use, and as you can see PAKE takes care of the privacy part so seems pretty fair to me
Thank you for introducing Croc, which looks really interesting.
Usually I prefer to use some kind of explorer to do some drag&drop to just transfer files. For network access WinSCP does a good job.
But it could be interesting to have some kind of sync feature that keeps projects up to date. Is there anything Croc could help me with?
First of all, I'm really happy you found this tool interesting!
For the scenario you're describing, actually, I don't think Croc is the best tool. Probably there are more suitable tools for that. I can imagine maybe some way one could use it programmatically to keep sync between two machines, but again, I think there's some more straight forward option to do that, I guess 🤔
Syncing may not be as simple as you think, so having some customizable tool might be a strong option. Maybe we could put some tool ontop, that cares for the sync and just uses Croc as a worker tool. But I cannot imagine how much Croc simplifies the process of copying. Can you provide an example what copying without Croc could mean?
I remember some very unpleasant scenes while trying to copy files from Linux to Windows, but that was years ago.