Question

I have a bash script which generates an SCP command to execute. The relevant parts of the code look like this:

echo $COPY_CMD
$COPY_CMD

My output looks like this:

rascher@localhost:~/Desktop/video_final$ ./xfervids.sh 
scp "/media/My Book/PhotosVideos/Videos/18May2008Download/SD_VIDEO/PRG001/MOV056.MOD" rascher@192.168.1.101:./video_working/
rascher@192.168.1.101's password: 
"/media/My: No such file or directory
Book/PhotosVideos/Videos/18May2008Download/SD_VIDEO/PRG001/MOV056.MOD": No such file or directory

However, when I take line 2 of my output: scp "/media/..., copy it, and paste it into the terminal, it works.

What am I doing wrong? I have tried escaping the space in “My Book” ("My\ Book"), putting two \ characters rather than one ("My\\ Book") but I can’t get this to behave consistently. Help?

Answer 1

You have to be excruciatingly careful when there are spaces in the path names.

In the context, you probably need:

eval $COPY_CMD

You don’t need quotes around the variable this time.