Answer by Lewis M for Readlink not working over ssh

Within the here document, your variables are being evaluated on the source side. If you want to have your variables be evaluated on the target side, escape the $. For example,

ssh -q $REMOTE -x << EOF    LINK="/path/to/my/link"    readlink \$LINK    TEST=\$(readlink -f "\$LINK")    echo \$TESTEOF

Hope this helps