Question

I am trying to automate some of my interactions with git using bash scripts. To do so I have a script that will ssh and list all the repositories and then clone them. Part of the script is shown here

DIRS=`ssh $u "ls $p"`;
for DIR in $DIRS; do
    echo "ssh://$u$p$DIR"
    echo "git clone ssh://$u$p$DIR";  
    git clone ssh://$u$p$DIR
done

Example arguments are

-u user@host

and

-p /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/somePath

This work fine for filepaths with spaces in their names up until the git clone part where it throws an error about too many spaces. If I copy and pasted the part echoed by

echo "git clone ssh://$u$p$DIR";

then it clones just fine. I have tried to surround this in quotes but it throws an error

does not appear to be a git repository

What am I doing wrong?

Edit 1

The errors when using git clone "ssh://$u$p$DIR" is

fatal: '/cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/somePath/repo1' does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Answer 1

I’ve used information from Gilles’s and Antak’s answer to find a solution as well as some other posts on running ssh on a remote machine and using variables in a bash heredoc.

As suggested by Gilles I avoided using ls and I’ve used Antak’s suggestion of using IFS=$'\n'
to avoid multiple arguments from spaces and split arguments on line breaks.

The final code I’ve settled on is

DIRS=`ssh "$u" << ENDSSH
    cd "$p"
    eval 'for file in *; do echo \\$file; done'
ENDSSH`

IFS=$'\n'
for DIR in $DIRS;
    do
    echo "ssh://$u$p/$DIR"
done
unset IFS