> Your "piped tar" doesn't cover the main use case of rsync, which is (unsurprisingly), remote file hierarchy sync'ing. That's exactly my point, isn't it? rsyn

> Your "piped tar" doesn't cover the main use case of rsync, which is (unsurprisingly), remote file hierarchy sync'ing. That's exactly my point, isn't it? rsync does several different things, depending on how you invoke it, rather than being a UNIXy tool that does one thing well. Because the single tool does everything, you can't easily swap out different parts of it, and the single tool takes a hundred options.