feature request: add -a to scp for archive-style copy

[Craig J Copi]

Jim Knoble writes:
>Circa 2002-Feb-20 13:37:06 -0500 dixit Joe Harrington:
>
>: This is a feature request for scp.  scp has no easy option to copy
>: symlinks, etc. to reproduce a directory tree.  The -r option follows
>: symlinks and reads the data out of device files when copying.  A few
>: years ago, the -a option was added to normal cp, replacing the
>: cumbersome and arcane
>  [...]
>
>'cp -a', to my knowledge, only works with the cp from GNU fileutils.

-a == -pRd  where
-p is preserve
-R is recurse
-d is "don't dereference symlinks"

For OpenBSD cp this appears to be equivalent to -pRP.

scp already has -r and -p, it does not have the equivalent of -d or -P.
So is such a thing useful for scp?  Using rsync/tar/... isn't that hard.

Craig