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I don't understand where the confusion is with scp. It's just like cp, except you have a syntax for making some of the arguments remote. It doesn't change the order, it always does semantically the same thing of moving something(s) somewhere.

This is not to criticize - we all have places our mental models break down unexpectedly. I'm just interested in how that's happening.

I find scp really easy. rsync, on the other hand, is like tar to me.

Easy way to remember extracting with tar is "eXtract Zee Files" -xzf.

I no longer have issues with tar since I found out that most systems I use don't need the compression format anymore, and are happy to figure it out themselves. Not sure if it works with compressing or not (I generally use 7z or zip), but you can just `tar -x[v]f` on anything, regardless of file extension, and tar will extract anything it supports.