SSH - Secure SHell

SSH allows the use of pipelines controls, and use inputs / outputs pipes as any other commands , on the basis that redirection is done to or from the remote machine.

This may be used to transfer files:

ssh server "cat remote_file" > local_file

The fact that the scp command does exactly the same thing, the usefulness of such a command is questionable,
but imagine that you need to transfer a file of several mega, using a fairly limited bandwidth:

ssh server "gzip -c remote_file" > local_file.gz

Here, the server compress the file, the command used will write the compressed file on the client machine.

It can go even further if you do not want to retrieve a gzipped file, but still want to lower bandwidth usage:

ssh server "gzip -c remote_file " |gunzip > local_file