How to scp folders with nasty names using a shell function

Question

I am trying to write a function that I will put on all my machines in order to make it easy to send files at a fixed place on my network.

Here is my script so far. Some folder may have duplicates names on my machines, so I'm adding a uuid at the end of the folder name.

function putOnSG3() {
uuid=`uuidgen`
if [[ -d $1 ]]; then scp -rv "$1" shiny:/Volumes/Seagate3To/"$1.$uuid";
else echo $1 " is not a directory. Not copying.";
fi;
}

I'm invoking it like this:

$ putOnSG testFo\[l\}der

Here is the problem:

zsh:1: bad pattern: /Volumes/Seagate3To/testFo[l}der.d84abc26-501b-4f89-a636-518b4059a770

How can I manage these nasty filenames ?

Target filesystem is case sensitive hfsplus, source filesystems are various extfs from Linux machines and NTFS.

Answer 1

All special symbols, like [,],(,),#, etc you should write after backslash "\". You can try do it:

$ touch test\[ ; ll test\[ ;
-rw-r--r-- 1 s.gvozdetskiy s.gvozdetskiy 0 Dec 12 12:00 test[
$ mkdir test\[ ; ll ./
...
drwxr-xr-x 2 s.gvozdetskiy s.gvozdetskiy     4096 Dec 12 12:04 test[
...

I think hfsplus support there specific.

Answer 2

Here is a working solution:

function putOnSG() {
uuid=`uuidgen`
if [[ -d $1 ]]; then du -sh "$1";
scp -rv "$1" shiny:/Volumes/Seagate3To/\"$1\".$uuid
else echo $1 "is not a directory. Not copying.";
fi;
}

The only differences with my initial non working solution are the backslashes around the quotes in the second argument of scp.