Do you use servers on the internet? Do you connect to them with ssh? Then you should take a look at SSHFS.

It allows you to mount a directory on a different computer as if it’s a directory on your own. And then sshfs takes care making sure that your commands do the right thing. It’s amazing.

In The Hideous Name Pike and Weinberger write about a similar thing. You can profit if you can the same tools in the same way regardless if you’re on your local machine or on a remote machine.