COPY form stdin and file

Hi all,
when untaring a pg_dumped tar file the data gets populated like this:

-----------------
COPY mytable (id, attr1, attr2) FROM stdin;
\.
copy mytable (id, attr1, attr2) from '$$PATH$$/2387.dat' ;
-----------------

where $$PATH$$ gets replaced by the current path.

Anyone knows whats the aim of this ?
The ".\" throws an error within the pgadmin sql query window:
ERROR: syntax error at or near "\" at character

Isn't it correct just to call:
# copy mytable (id, attr1, attr2) from '$$PATH$$/2387.dat' ; ?

Its kind of unrelaxed to untar a restored db (which i need to untar
from time to time because of changing libraries) and always need to
change the above lines of code.

Thanks for any info about this,
Chris