Comment (by Roland Haas):

Option 2, expanding ENV variables in simfactory, exists. It does however not solve this problem due to not working when simfactory’s --remote option is used or even to set up the target directory for a sim sync command which needs to know the “00915” part on the user’s laptop (to make it part of an rsync command line) where $HOME etc. the laptop’s and not the cluster’s.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/469/improve-default-directory-locations