Copying files (of a particular extension) remotely onto local computer preserving paths

Question

I have bunch of files on the remote server.

I'm not interested in most of them, except for .pl files.

I want to get a copy of these on my local computer.

What is the best way to do this (at the same try preserving its path)?

I'm thinking somewhere along the lines of:

find . -name "*.pl" | xargs scp localuser@localip

Sadly doesn't do the trick. Anyone have better ideas?

Answer 1

$rsync -av --prune-empty-dirs --include-from=filter user@remotesource/ target/

$cat filter

+ *.pl
+ */
- *

edit: typo

Answer 2

Maybe this?

{
  find -type d -printf "mkdir %p\n" ;
  find -name "*.pl" -printf "put %p %p\n" ;      
} | sftp localuser@localip