Stty: tcgetattr: A specified file does not support the ioctl system call.

Our production account just started receiving mail with errors from a script running in cron. The script ssh'es from the dr webserver to the primary web server and checks to see if tomcat is running; if not, it starts tomcat on the dr webserver.

This is the error:
stty: tcgetattr: A specified file does not support the ioctl system call.

This could be the line it is complaining about:
count=`ssh $safewshost -l $user "netstat -na|grep $port|grep tcp|grep LISTEN|wc -l"`

I found a similar problem to this in a post from 2003, and someone suggested using ssh -n (versus just ssh) to avoid this error....could that possibly be the case here?

Thanks,
Kat