i find it very disappointing that the gnu file utilities can't handle urls (speaking webdav under the hood, perhaps), and that gnu tar doesn't just automatically detect the compression type instead of making people remember whether bzip2 is 'y' or 'I' or 'j' or whatever this week.

sure, you can fill in the gaps with things like curl and wget and cadaver and remembering the magic bzip2 flag, but it just seems like someone isn't pushing the command-line interface forward when cp still doesn't understand urls.