I think the "pipe" part is more important than the "tar" part. It illustrates how processes can cooperate through the use of a standard communication tool and v

I think the "pipe" part is more important than the "tar" part. It illustrates how processes can cooperate through the use of a standard communication tool and very simple interfaces (the more I read the article, the more I saw the parallel with Go's io.Copy, io.Reader and io.Writer). Once you got how useful piping is, you understand why you can do something as powerful as: machineA: tar -cf - dir | gz | ncat -l -p 6789 machineB: ncat machineA 6789 | gunzip | tar -xf - And here you go, a dir is sent compressed through network with the power of little tools and a good inter-communication.