Comment by kerblang

That sounds like... Puzzle time! I had to cheat, sort of, by looking at the man page:

> Local file names can be made explicit using absolute or relative pathnames to avoid scp treating file names containing ':' as host specifiers.

So `scp foo:bar user@host:~` fails because it tries to find the host foo. But `scp ./foo:bar user@host:~` works just fine. I feel kind of stupid for not guessing as much.