Well both Joe's program and an FTP server & client are possible solutions to the problem "I want to get files from machine X." But I very much agree that the s

Well both Joe's program and an FTP server & client are possible solutions to the problem "I want to get files from machine X." But I very much agree that the speed of the custom solution can in large part be attributed to the fact that you can reject the cost and complexity of existing solutions like FTP (which set out to solve more than just Joe's immediate problem). Similarly, I often transfer files by piping them to netcat. EDIT: the point about tools still stands. For example: host1$ nc -l 1234 > my.file host2$ cat my.file | nc host1 1234 This is very easy to do given that unix is my toolbox. It'd be much more involved to write from scratch in (say) C. On the other hand, Joe's tool is much more powerful; it doesn't require him to manually interact with the shell on two different hosts, and his program can list files on the remote host and automatically download them under the correct name whereas I'm stuck manually redirecting nc's output to the right file (and cursing myself when I accidentally forget to change the name and overwrite a file I wasn't supposed to fetch). Those features were very easy to add to his program because Erlang is a powerful tool. On unix shell, it's much harder.