Bash command with a shell script variable which itself as a parameter with spaces

Question

Trying to do imbricated escape and that doesn't work obviously. My parameter with space is customer and its value is NAME WITH SPACE.

chroot /sites/FOLDER1 /bin/su FOLDER2 -c "/data/batch/myScript.sh -v -g -action params -customer NAME WITH SPACE"

I'm getting:

Error : Unknown parameter WITH

I read a few threads on the subjects but can't make out a solution : https://superuser.com/questions/360966/how-do-i-use-a-bash-variable-string-containing-quotes-in-a-command http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/050

Tried with single and double quote, with storing the param in a variable etc but no dice.

If I use

chroot /sites/FOLDER1 /bin/su FOLDER2 -c '/data/batch/myScript.sh -v -g -action params -customer 'NAME WITH SPACE''

It works a little better as I do not get the unknown parameter but it only takes NAME as parameter and ignore what is after the space

Charles Duffy · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-31 17:16:35Z

3

su -c "script-text" launches a separate shell interpreter which parses script-text as code. Consequently, that text needs to be escaped in an eval-safe manner. printf '%q' does this for bash (and will be entirely robust if your /bin/sh is a symlink to bash).

That is:

printf -v cmd '%q ' /data/batch/myScript.sh -v -g -action params -customer "NAME WITH SPACE"
chroot /sites/FOLDER1 /bin/su FOLDER2 -c "$cmd"

If your /bin/sh is not provided by bash, then you should consider an alternative implementation generating purely POSIX-compliant output, such as that provided by the Python pipes.quote() library function:

pyquote() {
  python -c 'import pipes, sys; print " ".join(pipes.quote(a) for a in sys.argv[1:])' "$@"
}

cmd=$(pyquote /data/batch/myScript.sh -v -g -action params -customer "NAME WITH SPACE")
chroot /sites/FOLDER1 /bin/su FOLDER2 -c "$cmd"

edited Jan 31, 2017 at 17:16

answered Jan 31, 2017 at 17:11

Charles Duffy

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4 Comments

TheBakker Over a year ago

Thanks, but I still get Unknown parameter WITH

TheBakker Over a year ago

declare -- cmd="/data/batch/myScript.sh -v -g -action params -customer NAME\\ WITH\\ SPACE "

TheBakker Over a year ago

Yes chroot /sites/FOLDER1 /bin/su FOLDER2 -c "$cmd"

Charles Duffy Over a year ago

To summarize from chat: There was a bug in myScript.sh, using $* rather than "$@" to iterate over arguments; with that fixed, the given solution now functions correctly.

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