Hello,

I'm having a problem with executing a shell command whose argument is a filename which may have single quotes, double quotes, or white spaces. Spcecifically, I need to execute the following command from a PHP script:

The problem is that if filepath contains a single or double quote, then the shell interpreter thinks its the end of the argument. Is there a way to escape the quotes to avoid this problem?

Thanks.

Afshin

The usual escape character for shells is the backslash '\'. It's like the escape-character standard in Unix

xmms-shell -e "load \'filepath\'"

I tried that, but it seems that it's being interpreted as a line break. The following is the output:

Incomplete command. Multi-line entry of commands not yet implemented.

Any other suggestons??

Thanks.

This works for bash, probably php as well.

set a variable, and use the variable in the script as such:

xmms-shell -e load "$filepath"

You may need, you might say a back door to get the variable set, since if you want to set, say hello to be .. hello " how are you that will not work. Try the following and see if it works and can be adapted to your needs.

$ cat > testlist
hello how are you
hello " how are you
hello ' how are you
<cntl-D>
$cat testfile|while read invar
> do
> test="$invar"
> echo test is --- "$invar"
> done
test is --- hello how are you
test is --- hello " how are you
test is --- hello ' how are you
$

This allows embedding single quotes, double quotes, and spaces. Most of these I of course avoid, except in all of the .ogg music I record (I gather you are in the same boat). It is just easier to write my scripts to fit the default names and keep my .cddb directory consistent with the network database than to rewrite everything. I do have a little problem with slashes "/" in filenames (Celtic medleys tend to like those), and I also just found a song I had "lost" that was called "...and Every Year Thereafter" (...those leading periods you know :-)

Oh! Silly me.

xmms-shell is the one interpreting that expression. (I just looked at the output of xmms-shell -help, and it looks like -e tells it "evaluate this expression). So it is not bash that you need to worry about, it's xmms-shell. Apparently xmms-shell interprets the backslash as the line-continuation character (which it is, in bash too I think, but only if it's followed by a linefeed).

I do not seem to have xmms-shell installed, so maybe you should check out its manpages to see if there's some special format to use for the expression after -e