To send a directory, cd to inside the directory whose contents you want to send on the computer doing the sending and do:
tar -cz . | nc -q 10 -l -p 45454
On the computer receiving the contents, cd to where you want the contents to appear and do:
nc -w 10 $REMOTE_HOST 45454 | tar -xz
Replace $REMOTE_HOST with ip / hostname of computer doing the sending. You can also use a different port instead of 45454.
What’s actually happening here is that the ‘receiving’ computer is connecting to the sending computer on port 45454 and receiving the tar’d and gzip’d contents of the directory, and is passing that directly to tar (and gzip) to extract it into the current directory.
Quick example (using localhost as a remote host)
Computer 1
caspar@jumpy:~/nctest/a/mydir$ ls
file_a.txt file_b.log
caspar@jumpy:~/nctest/a/mydir$ tar -cz . | nc -q 10 -l -p 45454
Computer 2
caspar@jumpy:~/nctest/b$ ls
caspar@jumpy:~/nctest/b$ nc -w 10 localhost 45454 | tar -xz
caspar@jumpy:~/nctest/b$ ls
file_a.txt file_b.log