File sharing with 0x0.st and magic-wormhole

0x0.st

The Null Pointer is a good site for file sharing. So sharing images, videos, textbooks, gifs, etcetera can be very simple with 0x0.st. The site offers flexibility of having a place to quickly upload and share SFW files. The best part? You can do it all from your terminal with curl.

# upload
$ curl -F'file=@SCC_23_team_logo.png' https://0x0.st
https://0x0.st/H3wm.png

# download
$ wget https://0x0.st/H3wm.png 


# Upload, setting an expiration an hour from now:
$ curl -F'file=@funny_team_logo.png' -Fexpires=1 https://0x0.st
https://0x0.st/H3wa.png

0x0.st does not allow past file sizes of 512MiB as well as some executables and some files described on the site. As some good advice if you don’t feel comfortable sharing the photos with the whole world you can encrypt them in some way, such as with gpg. But I personally like the way bugswriter does it: zip up a few files and zipcloak them; zipping files together has the benefit of allowing one to have one url for one file, and by zipping it is at least compressing the file size a little bit. zipcloak encrypts them, so they’re not easily viewable:

# Example: taking gifs, zipping them, and using zipcloak
$ zip -r screensaver_gifs.zip *.zip
$ zipcloak screensaver_gifs.zip 
Enter password: 
Verify password: 
encrypting: 100%Animosity.gif
encrypting: ErenReencounterWithColossal.gif  
encrypting: FlouriteEye.gif
encrypting: ScaryMob.gif
encrypting: cat_breakdancing.gif
encrypting: goodBoyMob.gif
encrypting: princessMononoke.gif

$ curl -F"file=@screensaver_gifs.zip" 0x0.st # this will use http and not https btw

# say this is someone else or from another computer that knows the password:

$ wget 0x0.st/H3wQ.zip
$ unzip H3wQ.zip 
Archive:  H3wQ.zip
[H3wQ.zip] 100%Animosity.gif password: 
  inflating: 100%Animosity.gif       
  inflating: ErenReencounterWithColossal.gif  
  inflating: FlouriteEye.gif         
  inflating: ScaryMob.gif            
  inflating: cat_breakdancing.gif    
  inflating: goodBoyMob.gif          
  inflating: princessMononoke.gif    
# Now we can view our files

0x0.st also used to offer URL-Shortening, but it has since been disabled. Check with one of its mirrors though.

bashupload.com, an alternative site that allows for larger file size at the cost of only one download. Boasts a 50G max, you can upload by choosing the file (allowing one to upload from a mobile phone actually), and has pretty good articles on different ways to use it (gpg encryption, uploading from mobile, etc): site. Another upside is that it allows you to set the name it will be found as, and that’s pretty darn good.

# upload
curl https://bashupload.com/ -T /var/file.txt

# upload
curl https://bashupload.com/<UPLOAD_NAME> --data-binary @/var/<CURRENT_FILE_NAME>


# download
wget https://bashupload.com/<UPLOAD_NAME>

Another alternative to this file sharing site is transfer.sh, which offers most of the same features as 0x0.st. It offers a max upload of 10GB for the cost of only storing a default of 14 days. There are some more options that it might be worth checking out over 0x0.st, such as setting max downloads or making it easier for normal people to upload with their examples.

The site tmpfiles.org has a maximum file size of 100Mb and only an hour, but allows you to upload from their site gui or with curl, and imgdb.net boasts to be a “resilient Image Archive”. One this site one can view all images posted, but as a downside there’s no direct way to upload with curl. I would still recommend 0x0.st and transfer.sh over both of these. These two also have their code so you can mirror them as well, which you should totally do:

Null Pointer (Mia’s gitea), bashupload.com, transfer.sh github. In any of these cases making a script will make your life easier.

magic-wormhole

Now all that was previously good. But sometimes you want send a specific file to someone physically nearby. What do you do? Now you can take a pen drive and store that file, then give them the drive. You could use 0x0.st but you worry about the file size or perhaps the contents. Maybe use netcat (video example), but that’s just too confusing. You can run python -m http.server 8000 to set up an ftp server, then figure out your ip with ip a or nmcli, but that’s 2 steps and anyone can just view it (this is a good option acutally). You can set up samba, nfs, or some file sharing service. There’s a lot of options, but… is this seriously necessary? I just want to send one or two files, and probably never agiain. It should be so simple… so why does it not feel this way?

Sending and receiving is as simple as two commands:

$ wormhole send file.mp4

$ wormhole receive

Now the wormhole package, called magic-wormhole not wormhole, and can be installed on most systems via the package manager: xbps, brew, pacman, .... The sender and receiver must both have this package. Here’s an example:

[SCC Documentation]$ wormhole send mpas_atmosphere_users_guide_8.0.1.pdf 
Sending 9.1 MB file named 'mpas_atmosphere_users_guide_8.0.1.pdf'
Wormhole code is: 4-paramount-backward
On the other computer, please run:

wormhole receive 4-paramount-backward

And from another system in the same network:

[Company_System]$ wormhole receive 4-paramount-backward
Receiving file (9.1 MB) into: 'mpas_atmosphere_users_guide_8.0.1.pdf'
ok? (Y/n): y
Receiving (->tcp:192.168.0.233:44059)..
100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 9.13M/9.13M [00:00<00:00, 46.3MB/s]
Received file written to mpas_atmosphere_users_guide_8.0.1.pdf

It’s pretty straightforward, as it should be. croc is another command that is essentially the same as magic-wormhole. It does have some more options, and most of the magic-wormhole commands are identical on croc, so it is a good substitution.