OpenSSH 8.0 released

scp server:/path/to/a/file.txt target.txt

and this should open and write to target.txt. I would be surprised if the server knew about that at all. Though I don't know.

Since that's implemented somehow, you would expect

scp server:/path/to/a/file.txt .

to just be client shorthand for

scp server:/path/to/a/file.txt ./file.txt

It seems seriously weird that it would not.

But there is also functionality like this:

scp server:/path/to/* .

where you just trust the remote server won't send you evil filenames that will destroy your world. And I don't see how you can solve that problem.

So it seems that the specific-file codepaths lazily used the known-file filepaths. Which is unfortunate, but not shocking, since scp -r is commonly enough used.