Readlink not working over ssh

I'm trying to send a bash command over SSH using ssh -q $REMOTE -x "command".Because I have multiple bash commands, I'm using << EOF.

The problem is that the readlink command returns me an empty string when I assign its result to a variable. When I call it directly, it's not.

Here is a simplified version of my code :

ssh -q $REMOTE -x << EOF    LINK="/path/to/my/link" # the link points to /path/to/my/file    readlink $LINK # outputs /path/to/my/file    TEST=$(readlink -f "$LINK")    echo $TEST # outputs an empty stringEOF

At that point I put the same code in a shell script on the remote machine and tried to call the shell script :

# local machinessh -q $REMOTE -x << EOF    ./test-scriptEOF

# remote machine "test-script"LINK="/path/to/my/link" # the link points to /path/to/my/filereadlink $LINK # outputs /path/to/my/fileTEST=$(readlink -f "$LINK")echo $TEST # outputs /path/to/my/file

Suddently it's working, when I'm calling the remote script everything works fine, but why is it not working over ssh ?