scp with semicolon failure to escape second semi-colon

Question

I can't seem to make this command work:

scp fx-devel1:/home/user/gege/feed.zip;2 fx-devel2:/home/user/gege/feed.zip;3

I have tried:

scp "fx-devel1:/home/user/gege/feed.zip;\2" "fx-devel2:/home/user/gege/feed.zip\;3"

yet it seems that it only escapes the first ';' as this appears:

feed.zip;2                                                    100%  302KB 301.8KB/s   00:00
bash: 3: command not found

How do I make it work? I would like to include the ';3' in the name of the destination file.

EDIT: I can make it work when I improvise -- I have to use mv after transferring:

scp 'fx-devel1:/home/user/gege/feed.zip\;2' fx-devel2:/home/user/gege/feed.zip

ssh fx-devel2 mv /home/user/gege/feed.zip '/home/user/gege/feed.zip\;3'

But that means a lot more time. When transferring thousands of file, that could almost double the time accessing the servers.

Use a single quote `'`, instead of the double quote `"`, to stop the shell from interpreting the `;`. But more importantly, why do you have a `;` in a filename? That is just going to make life hard. — Stephen Rauch, Feb 01 '17 at 07:26
`scp 'fx-devel1:/home/user/gege/feed.zip;2' 'fx-devel2:/home/user/gege/feed.zip;3'` does not work @StephenRauch — NightEye, Feb 01 '17 at 07:29
What does it do? You made need another level of quoting for the other end. — Stephen Rauch, Feb 01 '17 at 07:30
what does the semicolon do? as far as i know, it identifies what version is the file. — NightEye, Feb 01 '17 at 07:32
Sorry, what does the command do, when you use the single quotes? — Stephen Rauch, Feb 01 '17 at 07:33
Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/52843/discussion-between-stephen-rauch-and-innzaayynn). — Stephen Rauch, Feb 01 '17 at 07:33

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '17 at 15:35

2

This worked for me:

/tmp $ ls foo*
'foo;2'
/tmp $ scp 'foo;2' 'localhost:/tmp/foo\;3'
Password:
foo;2                                            100%    0    0.0KB/s    0.0KB/s    00:00
/tmp $ ls foo*
'foo;2'  'foo;3'
/tmp $

answered Feb 21 '17 at 15:35

Andy Dalton

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 01 '17 at 09:21

In bash single (') and double (") quotes can either be used to quote a semicolon. There is no need to put an extra backslash inside the quoted string to quote these. You need the backslash to quote some special chars inside double quotes but semicolon is not one of them (" and \ for example are).

After a test I conclude that the Command not found message comes from the remote machine! So the above is true, at least not as long as one shell is involved! But here the destination file name seems to be passed to the shell on the other side somehow.

So if your file is called /home/user/gege/feed.zip;2 and should be saved as /home/user/gege/feed.zip;3 on the other machine either of these should work

scp 'fx-devel1:/home/user/gege/feed.zip;2' 'fx-devel2:/home/user/gege/feed.zip\;3'
scp "fx-devel1:/home/user/gege/feed.zip;2" "fx-devel2:/home/user/gege/feed.zip\\;3"
scp fx-devel1:/home/user/gege/feed.zip\;2 fx-devel2:/home/user/gege/feed.zip\\\;3

You can make some tests how quoting in the shell works for yourself (and obviously read the relevant part of the man page) with this function:

test_quoting () {
  printf 'Number of args: %s\n' "$#"
  printf 'First arg: %s\n' "$1"
}
test_quoting abc def
test_quoting "abc def"
test_quoting 'xyz;123'
test_quoting foo\;bar
test_quoting 'foo\;bar'
# and so on

The answer you've given. All of them failed, all saying `bash: 2: command not found` with the usage of scp printed. — NightEye, Feb 01 '17 at 10:12
What does `test_quoting 'fx-devel1:/home/user/gege/feed.zip;2'` say? — Lucas, Feb 01 '17 at 10:40

scp with semicolon failure to escape second semi-colon

2 Answers2