Q:

recursively use scp but excluding some folders

Assume there are some folders with these structures
/bench1/1cpu/p_0/image/
/bench1/1cpu/p_0/fl_1/
/bench1/1cpu/p_0/fl_1/
/bench1/1cpu/p_0/fl_1/
/bench1/1cpu/p_0/fl_1/
/bench1/1cpu/p_1/image/
/bench1/1cpu/p_1/fl_1/
/bench1/1cpu/p_1/fl_1/
/bench1/1cpu/p_1/fl_1/
/bench1/1cpu/p_1/fl_1/
/bench1/2cpu/p_0/image/
/bench1/2cpu/p_0/fl_1/
/bench1/2cpu/p_0/fl_1/
/bench1/2cpu/p_0/fl_1/
/bench1/2cpu/p_0/fl_1/
/bench1/2cpu/p_1/image/
/bench1/2cpu/p_1/fl_1/
/bench1/2cpu/p_1/fl_1/
/bench1/2cpu/p_1/fl_1/
/bench1/2cpu/p_1/fl_1/
....

What I want to do is to scp the following folders
/bench1/1cpu/p_0/image/
/bench1/1cpu/p_1/image/
/bench1/2cpu/p_0/image/
/bench1/2cpu/p_1/image/

As you can see I want to recursively use scp but excluding all folders that name "fl_X". It seems that scp has not such option.
UPDATE
scp has not such feature. Instead I use the following command
 rsync -av --exclude 'fl_*' user@server:/my/dir

But it doesn't work. It only transfers the list of folders!! something like ls -R

A:

Although scp supports recursive directory copying with the -r option, it does not support filtering of the files. There are several ways to accomplish your task, but I would probably rely on find, xargs, tar, and ssh instead of scp.
find . -type d -wholename '*bench*/image' \
| xargs tar cf - \
| ssh user@remote tar xf - -C /my/dir

The rsync solution can be made to work, but you are missing some arguments. rsync also needs the r switch to recurse into subdirectories. Also, if you want the same security of scp, you need to do the transfer under ssh. Something like:
rsync -avr -e "ssh -l user" --exclude 'fl_*' ./bench* remote:/my/dir

A:

You can specify GLOBIGNORE and use the pattern *
GLOBIGNORE='ignore1:ignore2' scp -r source/* remoteurl:remoteDir

You may wish to have general rules which you combine or override by using export GLOBIGNORE, but for ad-hoc usage simply the above will do. The : character is used as delimiter for multiple values.

A:

Assuming the simplest option (installing rsync on the remote host) isn't feasible, you can use sshfs to mount the remote locally, and rsync from the mount directory. That way you can use all the options rsync offers, for example --exclude.
Something like this should do:
sshfs user@server: sshfsdir
rsync --recursive --exclude=whatever sshfsdir/path/on/server /where/to/store

Note that the effectiveness of rsync (only transferring changes, not everything) doesn't apply here. This is because for that to work, rsync must read every file's contents to see what has changed. However, as rsync runs only on one host, the whole file must be transferred there (by sshfs). Excluded files should not be transferred, however.

