I&#x27;m glad I asked, I wasn&#x27;t realizing that `cat` would read from stdin in this case.  Makes sense, given the Unix piping philosophy (which I use to great effect on buffers in vim).<p>But wrt your trick to copy a tree of files, what&#x27;s wrong with `cp -r src dest`, or `scp -r src desthostname:&#x2F;dest` if it&#x27;s over a network?  Is there some advantage this way?