Piping Binary Data to a Remote Shell

Piping works transparently through SSH to remote shells. Consider:

cat myfile | ssh user@desktop lpr

tar -cf - source_dir | \
ssh user@desktop 'cat > dest.tar'

The first example pipes myfile to lpr running on the machine named desktop. The second example creates a tar file and writes it to the terminal (because the tar file name is specified as dash), which is then piped to the machine named desktop and redirected to a file.