pax

Make Peace with pax

pax is one of the lesser known utilities in a typical Linux installation. That's too bad, because pax has a very good feature set, and its command-line options are easy to understand and remember. pax is an archiver, like tar(1), but it's also a better version of cp(1) in some ways, not least because you can use pax with SSH to copy sets of files over a network.