Shell Programming and Scripting

We were using ftp before and were able to pipe our files
get a1 p1 where p1 is pipe
this way we did not have to store files on our local server.

Now we are using sftp2 and in sftp2 get and mget are synonymous. When I do

get a1 p1

I get error p1: No such file or directory (it's looking for p1 on remote server)

I tried using scp (scp2) but it overwrites pipe with physical file.

Is there any other utility I can use to transfer file and read it in a pipe?

thanks

This command will take "testfile" and transfer it to another box with ip_address

cat testfile | ssh -l username ip_address "cat > testfile"

So lets say you have an app called "parse_testfile.pl" on the remote box (ip_address) that you wanna pipe the file to:

cat testfile | ssh -l username ip_address "cat | parse_testfile.pl"

The only downfall to using SSH to do this is the encryption overhead.