UPDATE:
I made progress, but I'm still unsure what I'm not understanding. I've reduced my script down to a single line, and I still run into the same issue.
Any insight on the following?
NOTE: if I enter "/Users/Da.../Docker" or as it is below using a backspace for the whitespace, the result is the same.
for myvm in $(find /Users/David/Documents/Virtual\ Machines/Docker -name *.vmx); do echo -e "VM name: $myvm"; done
VM name: /Users/David/Documents/Virtual
VM name: Machines/Docker/RHEL7-DockerHost-Node04.vmwarevm/RHEL7-DockerHost-Node04.vmx
...
VM name: /Users/David/Documents/Virtual
VM name: Machines/Docker/RHEL7-DockerHost.vmwarevm/RHEL7-DockerHost.vmx
VM name: /Users/David/Documents/Virtual
VM name: Machines/Docker/RHEL7-DockerHost-Node01.vmwarevm/RHEL7-DockerHost-Node01.vmx
What am I missing?
--------------------------
I've found similar questions, but the answers aren't working for me.
I'm writing a script that will allow me to start and stop multiple VMs within VMware Fusion without having to click each one using the vmrun command, found at "/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun".
Problem
When I try to alias vmrun:
alias myvmcli='/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun'
...I get the following error from bash:
line 3: /Applications/VMware\: No such file or directory
Discussion
It obviously is missing the whitespace, but I thought using the backspace character would indicate that whitespace should be used.
I've tried single quotes and double quotes in the alias line to no avail.
If I run alias from the command line, it works fine.
Solution/Thoughts?
I'm sure that creating a link can solve my problem, but I really want to know why this isn't working.
You can avoid both functions and aliases by adding the directory to your path:
PATH="/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library:$PATH"
Then vmrun by itself will work.
You need to quote twice:
alias myvmcli='"/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun"'
or escape:
alias myvmcli=\''/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun'\'
or
alias myvmcli="\"/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun\""
Be careful of the way the 2nd and 3rd are escaped. They differ.
You need the double quotation because you need to quote once because the alias command requires it (alias asd="echo asd"), and then once again because the command inside the alias requires it.
EDIT:
Even though I answered this, the alias you posted, works with me just fine. Could be due to differences in bash version though:
[ 0][s: ~ ]$ cd /tmp
[ 0][s: tmp ]$ alias asd='asd\ zxc/test'
[ 0][s: tmp ]$ asd
woooo!
A backslash \ is not required inside quotes, it is retained. You would only need the backslash if you didn't use quotes, but generally quotes are good.
$ echo 'Hello\ world'
Hello\ world
$ echo "Hello\ world"
Hello\ world
$ echo Hello\ world
Hello world
$ echo "Hello world"
Hello world
Using an alias inside a script is not good, aliases are really designed as productivity aids on the command-line.
In this case just assign it to a variable, you don't need an alias or a function.
cmd='/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmrun'
Then, when you want to run it:
"$cmd"
Note the double quotes, required because of the embedded space.
Tested on OS X with vmware.
As others have said, something more complex than this would require a function.
Related
Currently trying to move all of my aliases from .bash_profile to .zshrc. However, found a problem with one of the longer aliases I use for substituting root to ubuntu when passing a command to access AWS instances.
AWS (){
cd /Users/user/aws_keys
cmd=$(echo $# | sed "s/root/ubuntu/g")
$cmd[#]
}
The error I get is AWS:5: command not found ssh -i keypair.pem ubuntu#ec1.compute.amazonaws.com
I would really appreciate any suggestions!
The basic problem is that the cmd=$(echo ... line is mashing all the arguments together into a space-delimited string, and you're depending on word-splitting to split it up into a command and its arguments. But word-splitting is usually more of a problem than anything else, so zsh doesn't do it by default. This means that rather than trying to run the command named ssh with arguments -i, keypair.pem, etc, it's treating the entire string as the command name.
The simple solution is to avoid mashing the arguments together, so you don't need word-splitting to separate them out again. You can use a modifier to the parameter expansion to replace "root" with "ubuntu". BTW, I also strongly recommend checking for error when using cd, and not proceeding if it gets an error.
So something like this:
AWS (){
cd /Users/user/aws_keys || return $?
"${#//root/ubuntu}"
}
This syntax will work in bash as well as zsh (the double-quotes prevent unexpected word-splitting in bash, and aren't really needed in zsh).
BTW, I'm also a bit nervous about just blindly replacing "root" with "ubuntu" in the arguments; what if it occurs somewhere other than the username, like as part of a filename or hostname?
I seem to be stuck here. I want to send a system request from my script to another server via SSH, checking if a folder there exists. A folder path is passed from another script, stored in a variable and might have a space character in it. Since I couldn't replace the space with another character, to avoid a "not found" on folder like "foo bar", I need to pass something like
ls '/folderpath/foo bar' to other server's shell.
Sample code looks like this:
$cmd = 'ssh -i id_pub $ssh_addr ls $remote_dir';
if (system($cmd) == 0) {
do something
}
I've exhausted all possible options - tired to escape the possible space with \ before passing it to the command, tried to pass it with ' ', " ", inside and adding both before passing it into $cmd.
But I always end up with something like this:
ls \folderpath\foo\\ bar or ls \' \folderpath\foo bar\'
but not ls '\folderpath\foo bar'
I'm not that good with Perl, possible someone more experienced can recommend a workaround?
String::ShellQuote's shell_quote is useful in building shell commands.
my $remote_cmd = shell_quote("ls", "--", $remote_dir);
my $local_cmd = shell_quote("ssh", "-i", "id_pub", $ssh_addr, $remote_cmd);
system($local_cmd);
Of course, you can avoid the shell on the local side as follows:
use String::ShellQuote qw( shell_quote );
my $remote_cmd = shell_quote("ls", "--", $remote_dir);
system("ssh", "-i", "id_pub", $ssh_addr, $remote_cmd);
Running a local shell and using it to escape your command to be safe for the remote shell would look like this:
system('env', "ssh_addr=$ssh_addr", "remote_dir=$remote_dir", 'bash', '-c',
'printf -v remote_cmd "%q " ls -- "$remote_dir"; ssh "$ssh_addr" "$remote_cmd"');
Unlike just using "'$remote_cmd'", the above works with all possible values, including intentionally malicious ones, so long as your remote shell is also bash.
Thanks to #ikegami's answer for demonstrating the use of the end-of-options sigil -- to ensure that even a remote_dir value that starts with dashes is parsed as a positional argument by ls
OK you have several possibilities for shell expansion with the way you are doing this.
Firstly is using system() with a string. This will break all your paths on the space characters. you can solve this by using system as a list
system('ssh', '-i', 'id_pub', $ssh_addr, 'ls', $remote_dir)
Now we still have a problem as ssh will run the remote code on the remote server in a shell with shell expansion which will break the path on spaces again
So you need to put $remote_dir inside ' characters to stop the remote shell from breaking up the path: giving
system('ssh', '-i', 'id_pub', $ssh_addr, 'ls', "'$remote_dir'")
Hope this helps/works
Note that as the commenters below have said this makes the assumption that $remote_dir has no ' characters in it. You need to be either escaping or parsing $remote_dir to ensure that you don't get a path that looks like /file.txt'; rm -rf / # which will attempt to remove every file on the remote system
Let Net::OpenSSH take care of everything for you:
my $ssh = Net::OpenSSH->new($ssh_addr);
$ssh->error and die "unable to connect to remote host: " . $ssh->error;
if ($ssh->test('test', '-d', $remote_dir)) {
# do something here!
}
Oh, it seems you are on a Windows machine! You can use Net::SSH::Any there in a similar fashion.
In a shell script (in .zshrc) I am trying to execute a command that is stored as a string in another variable. Various sources on the web say this is possible, but I'm not getting the behavior i expect. Maybe it's the ~ at the beginning of the command, or maybe it's the use of sudo, I'm not sure. Any ideas? Thanks
function update_install()
{
# builds up a command as a string...
local install_cmd="$(make_install_command $#)"
# At this point the command as a string looks like: "sudo ~some_server/bin/do_install arg1 arg2"
print "----------------------------------------------------------------------------"
print "Will update install"
print "With command: ${install_cmd}"
print "----------------------------------------------------------------------------"
echo "trying backticks"
`${install_cmd}`
echo "Trying \$()"
$(${install_cmd})
echo "Trying \$="
$=install_cmd
}
Output:
Will update install
With command: sudo ~some_server/bin/do_install arg1 arg2
trying backticks
update_install:9: no such file or directory: sudo ~some_server/bin/do_install arg1 arg2
Trying $()
update_install:11: no such file or directory: sudo ~some_server/bin/do_install arg1 arg2
Trying $=
sudo ~some_server/bin/do_install arg1 arg2: command not found
Use eval:
eval ${install_cmd}
As explained in ยง3.1 "Why does $var where var="foo bar" not do what I expect?" of the Z-Shell FAQ, you can use the shwordsplit shell option to tell zsh that you want it to split variables up by spaces and treat them as multiple words. That same page also discusses alternatives that you might want to consider.
I believe you have two problems here - the first is that your install_cmd is being interpreted as a single string, instead of a command (sudo) with 3 arguments.
Your final attempt $=install_cmd actually does solve that problem correctly (though I'd write it as ${=install_cmd} instead), but then you hit your second problem: ~some_server/bin/do_install is not a known command. This is because sudo doesn't interpret the ~ like you intend, for safety reasons; it would need to evaluate its arguments using the shell (or do some special-casing for ~, which is really none of sudo's business), which opens up a whole can of worms that, understandably, sudo does its best to avoid.
That's also why it worked to do eval ${install_cmd} - because that's literally treating the whole string as a thing to be evaluated, possibly containing multiple commands (e.g. if install_cmd contained echo foo; sudo rm -rf / it would be happy to wipe your system).
You have to be the one to decide whether you want install_cmd to allow full shell semantics, including variable interpolation, path expansion, multiple commands, etc. or whether it should just expand the words out and run them as a single command.
Previous answers are correct, what worked for me was the below command in zsh
totalin=$(eval echo testing |wc -l)
echo "Total: $totalin"
I'm trying to run a script which uses my $HOME variable to set things up (it's gitolite, by the way).
However, it's failing because I'm on a system where the home directory path has spaces in it.
I want to hack the gitolite bash script at a single point so $HOME turns into something it can work with -- it gets used several times in the script and beyond, and in some places is concatenated to form subfolders, so wrapping it in "" won't work.
So to clean it up I need to say something like:
$HOME=(magic here)$HOME
(This is of course assuming that the perl scripts that come later don't also read the $HOME variable direct and also need fixing...)
Use quotes everywhere.
HOME="/Users/Foo Bar"
WORKDIR="$HOME"/Work
PLAYDIR="$HOME"/Games
MARATHONDIR="$PLAYDIR"/Marathon
Try this:
export HOME=`echo $HOME | sed -e "s/ /\\ /g"`
Hope that works for you!
Hopefully this should be a simple one... Here is my test.sh file:
#!/bin/bash
patch_file="/home/my dir/vtk.patch"
cmd="svn up \"$patch_file\""
$cmd
Note the space in "my dir". When I execute it,
$ ./test.sh
Skipped '"/home/my'
Skipped 'dir/vtk.patch"'
I have no idea how to accommodate the space in the variable and still execute the command. But executing this the following on the bash shell works without problem.
$ svn up "/home/my dir/vtk.patch" #WORKS!!!
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated! I am using the bash from cygwin on windows.
Use eval $cmd, instead of plain $cmd
Did you try escaping the space?
As a rule UNIX shells don't like non-standard characters in file names or folder names. The normal way of handling this is to escape the offending character. Try:
patch_file="/home/my\ dir/vtk.patch"
Note the backslash.