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POHow to escape a variable in bash when passing to command line argument
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  1. POHow to escape a variable in bash when passing to command line argument
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    copied!<p>I've got a bash script (cygwin) that uses some windows paths with spaces in them. Consequently, I have escaped the space with a \ in my variable definition. Everything within the script works fine. However, I need to pass this variable as an argument to command line executable. When I do that, my escaping gets messed up.</p> <p>Sample non-functional script:</p> <pre><code>#!/bin/sh # file paths destinationPath="/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/Eric/My Documents/" attachments="\n2013-12-12.pdf" body="Test Body" recipient="asdf@asdf.com" # prepare attachments args="" for file in $attachments ; do file=${file//[ \\n]/} touch $file mv $file "$destinationPath/$file" args="$args -a $destinationPath/$file" done # send email echo -e $body | email --from-addr nosender@mydomain.com --from-name "Automated CSS Downloader" --subject "Downloaded new file(s) \ from CSS" $args eric@mydomain.com </code></pre> <p>Output from the script:</p> <pre><code>$ bash -x test.sh + destinationPath='/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/Eric/My Documents/' + attachments='\n2013-12-12.pdf' + body='Test Body' + recipient=asdf@asdf.com + args= + for file in '$attachments' + file=2013-12-12.pdf + touch 2013-12-12.pdf + mv 2013-12-12.pdf '/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/Eric/My Documents//2013-12-12.pdf' mv: listing attributes of `2013-12-12.pdf': Invalid argument + args=' -a /cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/Eric/My Documents//2013-12-12.pdf' + echo -e Test Body + email --from-addr nosender@mydomain.com --from-name 'Automated CSS Downloader' --subject 'Downloaded new file(s) from CSS' -a /cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/Eric/My Documents//2013-12-12.pdf eric@mydomain.com email: WARNING: Email address 'and' is invalid. Skipping... email: FATAL: Could not open attachment: /cygdrive/c/Documents: No such file or directory </code></pre> <p>So, as you can see the escaped space in the path is not being exported in the $args variable. I am assuming the error comes on the line "args=...". But I am not sure how to escaped $destinationPath to ensure that the escaped characters are retained.</p> <p>I've tried using double quotes (with no escaped space) in destinationPath but to no avail. If I try to double quote $destinationPath in the args= line, then the output also gets all screwed up with a bunch of extra quoting.</p> <p>How can I get this to work? I've tried playing around with the $IFS variable, but I don't really know what I'm doing with it, and can't seem to get it working with that either, although I suspect the solution has something to do with $IFS.</p>
 

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