When copying a file with newlines (and probably many other characters) to a server with scp, the newlines are converted to ^J. Since this is not a direct copy, I consider it a bug. I do not suspect that it is a feature though I have not checked yet which part of the code is causing this. In Linux and *nix, all characters are possible in filenames except null and slash. Unicode is one good reason for this.

jvoss@ASLinWS01:~$ env | grep LA
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
jvoss@ASLinWS01:~$ scp 'waiting
for
what1.png' altsci.com:altsci/cell/uploads/
Enter passphrase for key '/home/jvoss/.ssh/id_dsa':
waiting\^Jfor\^Jwhat1.png     100%   50KB  49.8KB/s   00:00    

jvoss@dmitry:~/altsci/cell$ ls uploads/waiting*1.png
uploads/waiting\^Jfor\^Jwhat1.png

http://www.cell-game.com/uploads/waiting%0Afor%0Awhat1.png