For some reason, 'tar|tar' is many times faster than 'cp -a' (at least, when you're copying thousands of small files in deeply nested directories, on OS X). I noticed this once through experimenation, tried to find out why, and never got a good answer.

The other thing is that hard-linked files are apparently handled differently: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/316078/interesting-usage-...

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.