Question

I am attempting to write a shell script which SSHs into a server and then prompts the user to enter a file/folder.

ssh $SERVER <<EOF
cd downloads/
read -e -p "Enter the path to the file: " FILEPATH
echo $FILEPATH
eval FILEPATH="$FILEPATH"

echo "Downloading $FILEPATH to $CLIENT"
EOF

I am using heredoc instead of double quotes after the SSH to execute these commands because my shell script is rather large and I don’t want to be escaping every double quote.

When I was using double quotes, the prompt worked fine. However, now that I am using heredoc, the prompt no longer works.

What can I do to get the prompt to work with heredoc? And if not, is there any way I layout my script so that the prompt does work without wrapping everything in double quotes and escaping, like so:

ssh $SERVER "
cd downloads/
read -e -p \"Enter the path to the file: \" FILEPATH
echo $FILEPATH
eval FILEPATH=\"$FILEPATH\"

echo \"Downloading $FILEPATH to $CLIENT\"
exit
"

Answer 1

If you don’t need any variables from the client, why not try – and ssh -t might be useful.

export CLIENT=me 

CMDS=$(cat <<CMD 
cd downloads/ 
read -e -p "Enter the path to the file: " FILEPATH 
echo \$FILEPATH 
eval FILEPATH="\$FILEPATH" 

echo "Downloading \$FILEPATH to $CLIENT" 
CMD 
) 

ssh localhost -t "$CMDS" 

Note that if your only issue with double-quotes is escaping, and you do not plan on
using ' single quotes in your script, then you can ust do this:

ssh -t $SERVER '
# your script, unescaped.
# if you want access to a locally defined variable,
echo "CLIENT is '$CLIENT'."
'