transfer files from ssh server directly to client

Question

i have a ssh server which is use to store my files online. i need to make those file available for download easily so i am using paramiko library to connect to the ssh server (from my python script), it then lists files and displays on the webpage. the problem is that i dont want to download the files to the web server's disk (dont have enough space) then send them to the clients , instead do something like read the file and spit it like it can be done in php.

something like this in python

<?php
// your file to upload
$file = '2007_SalaryReport.pdf';
header("Expires: 0");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Content-type: application/pdf");
// tell file size
header('Content-length: '.filesize($file));
// set file name
header('Content-disposition: attachment; filename='.basename($file));
readfile($file);
// Exit script. So that no useless data is output-ed.
exit;
?>

Answer 1

Not a programmer's answer: instead of paramiko, mount the directory with documents with sshfs and serve the documents as if they were on the local file system

http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

Answer 2

A cgi script generates output on stdout which is delivered to the webserver. The output starts with header lines, one blank line (as a separator) and then the content.

So you have to change the header() calls to print statements. And readfile($file) should be replaced by

 print
 print open("2007_SalaryReport.pdf","rb").read()

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface