Incron misbehaving with file name expansion

arckane · 06-11-2020, 12:03 PM

Hi folks, it's been awhile!

I use incrontab to call a script to process files as they are uploaded to my server. The line looks like this:

/srv/dirwatched/ IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_MOVED_TO /bin/bash /srv/scripts/encode.sh $#

Simple stuff, and simple we love. Now, if someone uploads a file with an apostrophe it isn't processed. Fine, I'll wrap $# in double quotes... "$#" won't process the files properly, it's as if the script doesn't like the way the file name is presented.

Ideas?

shruggy · 06-11-2020, 04:54 PM

I think you're quoting it in the wrong place. It should be quoted inside /srv/scripts/encode.sh, not in the incrontab.

Perl module String::ShellQuote provides a command, shell-quote, that may help you quote arbitrary filenames inside the script. The package name is libstring-shellquote-perl in Debian-based distros, perl-String-ShellQuote in most RPM-based distros, perl-string-shellquote in Arch.

michaelk · 06-11-2020, 10:16 PM

As a frame of reference incron on CentOS 7 works as expected but just a limited test since we don't know how your upload process works.

Code:

/home/user/mydir	IN_CREATE,IN_CLOSE_WRITE  /home/user/myscript.sh "$#" 

#!/bin/bash

echo "$@" >> /home/user/data.dat

incron and my script was tested using the touch command.
touch ~/mydir/"test'a.txt"

And as expected data.dat contains

test'a.txt
test'a.txt

I assume your uploaded process works as expected so is it due to incron not passing the file name correctly or something else wrong with your encode script?