Date: 2007nov2 OS: Linux Level: Intermediate Q. What is a "tar pipe" ? A. It's a construct for copying directory trees. In the Linux/Unix shell run two tar commands, one creating and the other extracting in different folders like this:

(cd /src/dir; tar -cf - stuff) | (cd /dst/dir; tar -xvf -)

Unless you are trying to be fancy, might as well just using cp with the -R -p options. It was used more in the past to preserve file mode, ownership and date stamps but now the -p option for cp does that.