How to evaluate environment remote variables in SCP?

Question

Is there a way to have environment variables on a remote host evaluated when using SCP?

For instance, let's say I have $FOO= /mydir on host A; how would I do something like:

scp dogbert@hostA:$FOO/evil-secret-plans.txt .

Of course, $FOO isn't defined on my local machine so the above command doesn't work as it is.

Answer 1

Try it like this:

scp dogbert@hostA:$(ssh dagobert@hostA "echo $FOO")/evil-secret-plans.txt .

A bit of overhead.