CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonshellsubprocessscpspaces
blueFast
blueFast

Reputation: 44381

Quote spaces in filename when calling subprocess

Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of putting spaces in a filename. I need to do scp from python using that filename, which is problematic because the shell parses the command, and scp has also some quircks regarding spaces. This is my test code:

import subprocess
import shlex


def split_it(command):
    return shlex.split(command)
    #return command.split(" ")


def upload_file(localfile, host, mypath):
    command = split_it('scp {} {}:"{}"'.format(localfile, host, mypath))
    print(command)
    res = subprocess.run(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    return res.stdout.decode()


upload_file("localfile.txt", "hostname", "/some/directory/a file with spaces.txt")

Which gives:

['scp', 'localfile.txt', 'hostname:/some/directory/a file with spaces.txt']
scp: ambiguous target

Using the naive version with command.split(" "):

['scp', 'localfile.txt', 'hostname:"/some/directory/a', 'file', 'with', 'spaces.txt"']
spaces.txt": No such file or directory

The right, working scp command would be:

['scp', 'localfile.txt', 'hostname:"/some/directory/a file with spaces.txt"']
  1. Is there a ready solution for this?
  2. If not, what would be the robust way of doing:
split_it('scp localfile.txt hostname:"/some/directory/a file with spaces.txt"')
# returns ['scp', 'localfile.txt', 'hostname:"/some/directory/a file with spaces.txt"']

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2514

Answers (1)

mkrieger1
mkrieger1

Reputation: 23192

command = split_it('scp {} {}:"{}"'.format(localfile, host, mypath))

  1. Instead of building a command string, only to split_it again, directly build a list of arguments.

  2. In order to add one layer of quoting to the remote file path, use shlex.quote (or pipes.quote if using older Python versions).

command = ['scp', localfile, '{}:{}'.format(host, shlex.quote(mypath))]

Sources/related posts:

Upvotes: 4

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