I do think it's a problem that, as far as I can see, the exact behaviour of ssh command interpretation isn't explained anywhere in its man pages, even though it seems like the only possibility if you understand the protocol. ssh(1) just says "If command is specified, it is executed on the remote host instead of a login shell", but that doesn't provide any hint about what quoting of metacharacters might be required, which is important since ssh is often used as plumbing. Now, I understand that ssh doesn't itself control how the command is parsed: it just executes the user's shell with -c and the command as arguments (passing the whole command as a single argument). However, that's not the only possible interpretation of the bit from ssh(1) that I quote above, and it would be helpful to clarify the documentation to say so explicitly. People who need to work out subtle details of quoting rules could then at least know to consult the documentation of the appropriate shell. Another thing that's poorly-explained in ssh(1) is the handling of the case where the command is passed to ssh as multiple arguments (e.g. 'ssh host echo foo' rather than 'ssh host "echo foo"'). The behaviour is that all the arguments are concatenated into a single string with a space character between them, but as far as I can see ssh(1) makes no mention of this whatsoever and so I don't think this is well-understood. It's important to explain this because the following example is not handled in the way that one might naturally expect: ssh host cat 'path with spaces' The command sent to the server is the string "cat path with spaces", which will then typically be split into four words by the shell at the other end. If you want to preserve the quoting then you need to write it as something like this: ssh host "cat 'path with spaces'" -- Colin Watson [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx] _______________________________________________ openssh-unix-dev mailing list openssh-unix-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.mindrot.org/mailman/listinfo/openssh-unix-dev
