  Cosmological scaling solutions are particularly important in solving the
coincidence problem of dark energy. We derive the equations of sub-Hubble
linear matter perturbations for a general scalar-field Lagrangian--including
quintessence, tachyon, dilatonic ghost condensate and k-essence--and solve them
analytically for scaling solutions. We find that matter perturbations are
always damped if a phantom field is coupled to dark matter and identify the
cases in which the gravitational potential is constant. This provides an
interesting possibility to place stringent observational constraints on scaling
dark energy models.
