Pass argument in quotes with percent signs in Windows cmd - windows

Question

I'm trying to use Hadoop's stat command to retrieve file information from my HDFS. On Linux, you pass formatting strings to stat (similar to the GNU stat builtin) like:
$ hdfs dfs -stat "type:%F perm:%a %u:%g size:%b mtime:%y atime:%x name:%n" /file
But I can't figure out how to get this to work in Windows' cmd prompt:
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat "type:%F" /file
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat "type:%F" /
-stat: java.net.URISyntaxException: Relative path in absolute URI: type:F
...
...it looks like it's trying to interpret the first argument as the path, instead of the second one. So I thought "maybe I need to include literal quotes?" Trying to escape the quotes with ^" doesn't work:
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat "^"type:%F^"" /
-stat: java.net.URISyntaxException: Relative path in absolute URI: ^^type:F
...
...in fact, it looks like it auto-escaped the ^ I sent in, but didn't send any quotes at all. Trying to surround the whole argument in single quotes rather than double quotes also doesn't work:
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat '^"type:%F^"' /
-stat: java.net.URISyntaxException: Relative path in absolute URI: 'type:F'
...
This time, it included the single quotes but again skipped the double quotes. Double-escaping the carats also doesn't work:
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat '^^"type:%F^^"' /
-stat: java.net.URISyntaxException: Relative path in absolute URI: 'type:F%5E%5E'
...
Triple-escaping the carats yields the same result as using a single carat.
I've found that a kludgey solution is to begin the formatting string with %3, and not surround it with quotes
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat %3%u /
3Andrew.Watsonuu
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat %3%u%g /
3Andrew.Watsonsupergroupgg
...but you can see that the returned string then has a 3 at the start, and the last flag character is doubled at the end uu or gg. I think this is because the %N are converted to the arguments that I passed to that function, like:
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat %0 /
stat: `hadoop': No such file or directory
2019-09-25 12:28:00
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat %1 /
stat: `fs': No such file or directory
2019-09-25 12:28:00
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat "%2" /
-stat: Illegal option -stat
You can see that %0, %1, and %2 correspond to the first, second, and third tokens in that command. So when I call %3, it substitutes the fourth argument into itself. This explains the weird repeated, glitchy output:
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat %3"repeat" /
3repeat"repeat"repeat
So the best solution I've come up with so far is to pass a superfluous argument at the end (which will throw an error), but then reference that argument earlier in the command, like:
C:\> hdfs dfs -stat -R %6 / "%%u %%g %%Y" 2> nul
Andrew.Watson supergroup 1569414480510
Andrew.Watson supergroup 1568728730673
...
Andrew.Watson supergroup 1568103636381
Andrew.Watson supergroup 1568103590659
It throws that error at the end, which I hide by piping it to nul. There's got to be a better way to do this. Any ideas?