Question

I’m having trouble writing up a simple perl script so I can sync two folders.
My code is:

my $string= "rsync -va ~/Dropbox/Music\ \(1\)/ ~/Music/Music/";
`$string`;

I also tried just using the line

`rsync -va /Dropbox/Music\ \(1\)/ ~/Music/Music/;`

Next I tried:

my @args=("bash", "-c","rsync -va ~/Dropbox/Music\ \(1\)/ ~/Music/Music/");
system(@args);`

I get the same error:

sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `(' each time

(yeah, those spaces and parens in the originating folder are a pain, but don’t yell at me, I didn’t create it….)

Answer 1

The problem is that the actual shell command you’re running is

rsync -va ~/Dropbox/Music (1)/ ~/Music/Music/

because the all the backslashes are swallowed by Perl (since it, like Bash, uses backslash as a quoting/escape character). To avoid this, you need to either use single-quotes:

system 'rsync -va ~/Dropbox/Music\ \(1\)/ ~/Music/Music/';

or else re-escape your backslashes:

system "rsync -va ~/Dropbox/Music\\ \\(1\\)/ ~/Music/Music/";