Transfer.sh – File sharing from the command line

There are so many tools that can transfer files between two computers. I really like ones like this because you don't have to have SSH access or forward any ports to send a file from A to B. Its similar vein to other peer-to-peer utilities like zget [1], sharedrop [2], instant.io (webtorrent) [3], filepizza (webtorrent) [4], magic-wormhole [5], toss [6], dat [7], and many many others. During Hacktoberfest I also started my own, written in Go, so I could have…

This is exactly the use case for Magic Wormhole, which is what the cool kids use to transfer files: https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole Magic Wormhole uses an end-to-end PAKE to create an encrypted transport between two points in the Internet, using a rendezvous server. It doesn't store files, which is almost never what you want; it's not a way to send a file and have 10 or 100 people download it. But it's probably the best way to get a file through a…

That's great, you can encrypt stuff then as follows (on a Mac). brew install gpg gpg --gen-key gpg -ac < file.unencrypted | curl http://transfer.sh/file.encrypted -T - To decrypt, take the returned URL: curl https://transfer.sh/1nKXr/file.encrypted | gpg -ad Someone can probably improve this!

Really sad to see transfer.sh go. It was an extremely useful service for sending files to people, like Firefox Send but with fewer limitations, and didn't require signing up for an account. Obviously it's extremely difficult to keep a service like this running indefinitely, but it's obviously of great value to many people. Maybe one day we'll be able to work out a successful method for community funding of services like this.