In message <Pine.NEB.4.30.0105021122290.258-100000@handy.villians.invalid>, Fre
derick Bruckman writes:
>On Wed, 2 May 2001, Steve Bellovin wrote:
>
>> The dump is done over the (switched, 100BaseT) network via ssh:
>>
>> /sbin/dump -0 -u -f - /usr | ssh 135.207.228.197 "umask 077; cat >$Full/usr.
>$x"
>>
>> When I did a trial restore on the server machine, things weren't
>> healthy -- restore said that it reached end-of-file in the middle of
>> a file, and that it couldn't finish processing many assorted files.
>
>"ssh" does not give a transparent pipe by default. To use "ssh" as a
>general substitute for "rsh", use "-o EscapeChar none". You could also
>set that option, by host, in "~/.ssh/config".
>

That sounds highly improbable when neither stdin nor stdout are ttys.
In fact, I did some tests with ~ in the first position of a line, and 
nothing weird happened to it.  Here's what the man page says:

     If no pseudo tty has been allocated, the session is transparent and can
     be used to reliably transfer binary data.  On most systems, setting the
     escape character to ``none'' will also make the session transparent even
     if a tty is used.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb