Escaping quotes when using SSH

linux bash ssh quoting
fedeisas picture fedeisas · Jul 8, 2011 · Viewed 14.2k times · Source

I'm trying to build a simple deployment script for my PHP apps. I know there are several tools for this job (Capistrano, Phing, etc.) but they seem like a lot of work for my simple deployment routine.

I use sshpass to avoid typing my password over and over again. But after uploading my compressed installer, I need to ssh into the server and run some commands. One of which is sed. So, quotes are breaking my script. It's something like this:

sshpass -p foo ssh user@host "
   cd /www/htdocs/foo/bar 
   echo 'Untar and remove installer'
   tar -zxf install.tar.gz

   sed "s/define('ENVIRONMENT', 'development');/define('ENVIRONMENT', 'production');" index.php > tmp && mv tmp index.php
   sed "s/define('ENVIRONMENT', 'development');/define('ENVIRONMENT', 'production');/" admin/index.php > tmp && mv tmp admin/index.php

"

As you can see, I use double-quotes to start my SSH statements, but I also need to use them on sed.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer

Flimzy picture Flimzy · Jul 8, 2011

Escaping the internal quote marks is the normal way. Does this not work?

sshpass -p foo ssh user@host "
cd /www/htdocs/foo/bar
echo 'Untar and remove installer'
tar -zxf install.tar.gz

sed \"s/define('ENVIRONMENT', 'development');/define('ENVIRONMENT', 'production');\" index.php > tmp && mv tmp index.php
sed \"s/define('ENVIRONMENT', 'development');/define('ENVIRONMENT', 'production');/\" admin/index.php > tmp && mv tmp admin/index.php

"

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