Question

I want to call a python script, script1.py, which takes a regex string as argument. This script then connects to another server and calls a script2.py.

script1.py:

regex = sys.argv[1]
log = os.popen('ssh otherserver python /home/log/scripts/script2.py \"%s\"' % regex)
for line in log:
    print line.strip()
log.close()

script2.py:

regex = re.compile(sys.argv[1])
for line in ['[1','[  2]',' a ']:
    if regex.search(line):
        print line.strip()

The problem I’m running into is that parentheses are breaking the script when run through SSH.
This works:

[foo@bar scripts]$ python script1.py “.*”
[1
[ 2]
a

This doesn’t:

[foo@bar scripts]$ python script1.py “(.*)”
bash: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token ('
bash: -c: line 0:python /home/log/scripts/script2.py (.*)’

Why isn’t the argument in the second example escaped? This does not occur if I call script2.py locally without SSH.

Update with solution:

Turns out the solution was using subprocess, but passing arguments didn’t work, so I had to format the last argument to include the escaped regex:

log = subprocess.check_output(['ssh', 'eu1', 'nice', 'python', '/home/log/scripts/script2.py \"%s\"' % regex])
print log.strip()

Answer 1

Try this:

import subprocess
output = subprocess.check_output(['ssh', 'otherserver', 'python', '/home/log/scripts/script2.py', regex])