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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T02:16:29+00:00

Some research revealed a few useful stackexchange posts, namely expanding variable in CURL ,

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Some research revealed a few useful stackexchange posts, namely expanding variable in CURL, but that given answer doesn’t seem to properly handle bash variables that have spaces in them.

I am setting a variable to the output of awk, parsing a string for a substring (actually truncating to 150 characters). The string I am attempting to POST via curl has spaces in it.

When I use the following curl arguments, the POST variable Body is set to the part of the string before the first space.

curl -X POST 'https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/GUID/SMS/Messages.xml' -d 'From=DIDfrom' -d 'To=DIDto' -d 'Body="'$smsbody'" -u SECGUID

smsbody is set as:

smsbody="$(echo $HOSTNAME$ $SERVICEDESC$ in $SERVICESTATE$\: $SERVICEOUTPUT$ | awk '{print substr($0,0,150)}')"

So the only portion of smsbody that is POSTed is $HOSTNAME$ (which happens to be a string without any space characters).

What is the curl syntax I should use to nest the bash variable properly to expand, but be taken as a single data field?

Seems pretty trivial, but I messed with quotes for a while without luck. I figure someone with better CLI-fu can handle it in a second.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It looks like you have an extra single quote before Body. You also need double quotes or the $smsbody won’t be evaluated.

    Try this:

    curl -X POST 'https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/GUID/SMS/Messages.xml' \
    -d 'From=DIDfrom' -d 'To=DIDto' -d "Body=$smsbody" -u SECGUID

    If the $s are still an issue (I don’t think spaces are), try this to prepend a \ to them:

    smsbody2=`echo $smsbody | sed 's/\\$/\\\\$/g'`
curl -X POST 'https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/GUID/SMS/Messages.xml' \
    -d 'From=DIDfrom' -d 'To=DIDto' -d "Body=$smsbody2" -u SECGUID

    If I run nc -l 5000 and change the twilio address to localhost:5000, I see the smsbody variable coming in properly.

    matt@goliath:~$ nc -l 5000POST / HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Basic U0VDR1VJRDphc2Q=
User-Agent: curl/7.21.6 (x86_64-apple-darwin10.7.0) libcurl/7.21.6 OpenSSL/1.0.0e zlib/1.2.5 libidn/1.20
Host: localhost:5000
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 45
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

From=DIDfrom&To=DIDto&Body=goliath$ $ in $:
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