Question

I have a bash script which I would like to handle spaces. I know there a ton of questions on here about this, but I was unable to resolve my problem.

According to what I’ve read, the following should work. The space in
../tool_profile/OS\ Firmware/updater is being escaped. In the script, the $2 variable is being enclosed in quotes when being assigned to DEST.

If I pass this path in to ls enclosed in quotes or with escaped spaces on the command line, it works.

example script command:

./make_initramfs.sh initramfs_root/ ../tool_profile/OS\ Firmware/updater/ initramfs

error from ls in script:

ls: cannot access ../tool_profile/OS Firmware/updater/: No such file or directory

make_initramfs.sh:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 3 ]; then
        echo "Usage: `basename $0` <root> <dest> <archive_name>"
        exit 1
fi

ROOT=$1
DEST="$2"
NAME=$3

echo "[$DEST]"

# cd and hide output
cd $ROOT 2&>/dev/null

if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then
        echo "invalid root: $ROOT"
        exit 1
fi


ls "$2" # doesn't work
ls "$DEST" # doesn't work


# check for 'ls' errors
#if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then
#        echo "invalid dest: $DEST"
#        exit 1
#fi

#sudo find . | sudo cpio -H newc -o | gzip --best > "$DEST"/"$NAME"

---

Thank you for any clues to what I am doing wrong! ^_^

Answer 1

Okay… so right as I submitted this I realized what I was doing wrong.

I was passing two relative paths in and changing to the first one before verifying the second one. So once I changed directory, the second relative path was no longer valid. I will post an updated script once I get it finished.

Edit: I finished my script. See below.
Edit2: I updated this based on everyone’s comments. Thanks everyone!

make_initramfs.sh:

#!/bin/bash


if (( $# != 2 )); then
    echo "Usage: `basename $0` <root> <dest>"
    exit 1
fi

root="$1"
archive="${2##*/}"
dest="$PWD/${2%/*}"

# cd and hide errors
cd "$root" &>/dev/null
if (( $? != 0 )); then
    echo "invalid path: $root"
    exit 1
fi

if [ ! -d "$dest" ]; then
    echo "invalid path: $dest"
    exit 1
fi

if [ "$archive" = "" ]; then
    echo "no archive file specified"
    exit 1
fi

if [ `whoami` != root ]; then
    echo "please run this script as root or using sudo"
    exit 1
fi

find . | cpio -H newc -o | gzip --best > "$dest"/"$archive"