/fling

Terrible program for flinging files and pipes over a network.

Primary LanguageC

fling -- transfer data from stdin over network to destination quickly

fling transfers data quickly over a trusted network. It does not encrypt the data. It tries to avoid copying data between kernel and userspace where it can; you will see the most improvement over other tools like netcat on systems with low memory bandwidth. fling is extremely Linux-specific, as almost all the optimisations used beyond what other similar tools do are non-portable.

You need to run fling on both ends of the transfer. Run it first on the receiver:

fling -r 12756 > file.dat

And then on the sender:

fling other.host.address 12756 < file.dat

Note that sender reads the data from its stdin, receiver writes it to stdout.

Using ssh

You can have fling run fling on the remote end over ssh. This avoids having to start it manually, in a different terminal. You still need the fling executable on the remote end. If it's not in the PATH, you can set the FLING_REMOTE_EXE environment variable to specify where it is.

FLING_REMOTE_EXE="/usr/local/bin/fling" ./fling other.host:data < data

If your ssh command is not called ssh, you can set its name using the FLING_SSH envionment variable.

The ssh support is currently experimental.

To build

Get source code from https://github.com/rjek/fling and build it on Linux by running the make command. Copy the fling binary to the target host, or build a fresh copy there.

Wire protocol

The wire protocol, i.e., what gets transferred over the TCP connection between two fling processes, is really simple. It is just the bytes of the input file to be transferred, no metadata, no checksum, and only one file allowed. This is to keep things as simple and fast as possible.

Legalese

Licence: MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

Copyright 2019 Codethink Ltd.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.