Zsh SCP – Escaping Quotes for SCP

quotingscpzsh

I needed to write a that behaves correctly with nasty (spaces, braces, etc..)
filenames.

scp -rv "$1" shiny:/Volumes/Seagate3To/\"$1\"

This function works, but I don't understand why the quotes need escaping in the second argument of scp.

Best Answer

Let say $1 is

This is a test directory name

We escape the double quote because we want to pass the target directory (part after colon) as a whole (including the double quotes) to the target machine.

Following is what we want to past to target

/Volumes/Seagate3To/"This is a test directory name"

Without the escape, the double quote will be consumed by the local machine and following string is sent, which become 6 strings separated by space

/Volumes/Seagate3To/This is a test directory name

Resulting an error.

Related Solutions

Shell – Quoting and escaping

You should use like this:

"\"Test Internal Cluster\""

or wrap it in single quote:

'"Test Internal Cluster"'

Test:

#!/bin/bash

echo $1

Output:

% bash test.sh "\"Test Internal Cluster\""
"Test Internal Cluster"

Update

The problem here is becasue you call perl with $1, $1 contains white space, so perl will see it as three separate arguments.

To prevent this, you should wrap $1 in double quotes "$1".

Another note is you should handle $1 argument in perl script, because if $1 contains any special characters, it will cause some bugs in perl program. you can use quotemeta($ARGV[0]).

Note

I think you shoul not pass all argument as a string to shell script. You should pass them as normal, except cluster name, you still have to wrap it as string. Then pass them to perl script by "$@" instead of $1.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – Quoting and escaping

Related Question