Question

I have a bash script that takes a url with variables and writes it to a file, problem is the ampersand is interfering and being interpreted as a command / control character.

In this situation the string cannot be escaped BEFORE being passed to the script and I have yet to find any way to do this.

if [ $1 ] ; then
    url=$1
    printf %q "$url" > "/somepath/somefile"
fi

with $1 being for example localhost?x=1&y=2&z=3

What get’s printed is only the part before the first ampersand: “localhost?x=1”

I have also tried echo instead of printf but it’s exactly the same ??

Answer 1

Your script is fine, but you need to invoke the script with a quoted parameter:

./myscript.sh "localhost?x=1&y=2&z=3"