I've got a fairly complex bit of code (a for loop within a for loop) which I'm trying to execute remotely, however because of the special characters this exits without making the connection.

Can anyone give me a hand and suggest how I'd go about sorting this?

Usually I'd do:

ssh root@ipaddress "for i in `cat /etc/hosts | awk '{print $2}'`; do ping $i; done;"

But given the complexity of my code this usual tactic doesn't work

Often you want single quotes around the whole thing, so that there is no parameter expansion before it gets passed to the remote machine by ssh, otherwise you would need to escape the $ characters.

When you need a single quote inside the statement, you have to exit the quotes, escape the single quote, and then reenter the quotes (hence the '\'' sequences). The $(...) is an alternative to the backquotes which can sometimes be more readable.

Incidentally, you will also want to limit the number of pings or it will never finish, and sometimes the /etc/hosts file has lines that might confuse this script.

2 members found this post helpful.

How about this?

Evo2.

2 members found this post helpful.

My friend that works an absolute treat, much appreciated