I've noticed in the past that when I paste into a terminal window connected over SSH that occasionally characters get dropped from the stream. Usually I ignore the issue and search/replace them manually, but this time I investigated more.
I found out that ever 512th character doesn't make it to the server. So, if I paste the following string:
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________X______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________X______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________X______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________X______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________X
...all I see in the terminal window is a row of underscores.
This happens pretty consistently across the various servers I need to connect to - is it a problem with my terminal, the SSH setup on the servers, SSH in general or something else?
EDIT:
I'm using OpenSSH_5.2p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8l 5 Nov 2009
on Snow Leopard, but noticed the issue on Leopard previously too
Almost certainly your SSH client, I use putty and routinely past in more than 512 chars, I couldn't recommend it more.
Some Operating Systems use short buffers for the pseudo-tty pipes and when they are overflooded they just drop data