Useful Line for Quoting Shell Arguments

Lo! In the east against the blazing shadow of a rising sun, there come four men striding in unison, each step a journey, against the terrible winds.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Safely pass "@*" to ssh without having to worry about the remote shell re-expanding variables.


qa=`perl -e 'for (@ARGV) {s/(["\\$])/\\\\$1/g; $_="\"$_\"";} print join(" ", @ARGV)' "$@"`
ssh remote-server "cd /some/where; do something; $qa"

Single quote version is safer, but is harder for me to read.


qa=`perl -e "for (@ARGV) {s/'/'\\\\\''/g; \\\$_=\"'\\\$_'\";} print join(' ', @ARGV);" "$@"`

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