It's a display bug in PuTTY+Epsilon, but a subtle one! I upgraded PuTTY from 0.65 on one PC to 0.73 (latest) and the problem disappeared. I still see it on another PC running PuTTY 0.70. I'm still trying to characterize it but the output is correct and it's because I'm using Epsilon to view the output file that I'm not seeing the missing characters. The issue is related to repeating characters, such as the runs of dashes seen in a ls listing. But I'm able to reproduce it by displaying a file with a run of any character in Epsilon. So there's some quirky interaction between the terminal usage of Epsilon, PuTTY 0.70, and CentOS 8's openssh+bash. I ran back through PuTTY versions and it doesn't happen starting with 0.71, so that version fixed something that CentOS 8 triggers in the older versions. Here's its changelog: <https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/changes.html>