I was recently trying to do a secure copy of a text clipping from one Mac to another Mac. When I first performed this with this command...
scp joe_blow@192.168.1.100:Desktop/foo.textClipping ~/Desktop/
...only the filename transfered over to the Mac, but the content was empty. That's because the text clipping keeps the actual text in the resource fork of the file.
scp -E joe_blow@192.168.1.100:Desktop/foo.textClipping ~/Desktop/
The :Desktop after the IP address means that Desktop is relative to the home user's account. For an absolute path use :/, followed by the path name. If you want to preserve the modification and access times as well as the content, then in addition use the -p option:
scp -Ep user@hostname:path path
Of course, these options can also be applied if you are sending a file using scp to a remote machine.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070226164433754