Apparently this is something that is often used in place of scp or rsync or similar. The basic idea is: use `tar` to compress files on machine 1, pipe to machine 2, untar on machine2.
This article also mentions piping the output of `dd` to `ssh` to create a disk image on a remote machine which seems fully insane in a good way:
@darius Yes! Pipes never cease to amaze :) I once attempted to make a script to do system monitoring on remote systems by creating a FIFO named pipe file on the remove system, running commands like vmstat and having them dump to that pipe file (formatted with awk), and cat-ing the whole thing across an SSH link to a local named pipe. Then you could build a tree structure reading and writing those pipe files down to one master node...it worked alright but it was quite insane :D