I am trying to write a shell script that creates some directories on a remote server and then uses scp to copy files from my local machine onto the remote. Here's what I have so far: ssh -t user@server<<EOT DEP_ROOT='/home/matthewr/releases' datestamp=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S) REL_DIR=$DEP_ROOT"/"$datestamp if [ ! -d "$DEP_ROOT" ]; then echo "creating the root directory" mkdir $DEP_ROOT fi mkdir $REL_