How to interpret ' character in a string passed through SSH

Question

New to BASH and Linux and need some quick help. I have written a quick bash script that asks the user for a username and password from the command line and passes that info to a remote server later via SSH. Problem is, one user has a ' character in the password and the value is causing EOF errors when using SSH. The following is my code to capture the username and password

echo "Please type in username:"
read username
read -s -p "Enter Password: " password

and the following is where I send the information to the remote server. Note, there is an array of servers I must send this to.

echo "Adding username and password..."  
ssh root@${dssAssocArray[$key]} "echo username=$username > /etc/smbcredentials"
ssh root@${dssAssocArray[$key]} "echo password=$password >> /etc/smbcredentials"

Is there some simple way to dereference the ' (if that's the correct term) or any other special character that might cause an escape?

Answer 1

Just make it:

echo "Adding username and password..."  
ssh "root@${dssAssocArray[$key]}" 'cat > /etc/smbcredentials' << EOF
username=$username
password=$password
EOF

Answer 2

You should be able to get around that by simply quoting your inner strings on the ssh command. For example

echo "Adding username and password..."  
ssh root@${dssAssocArray[$key]} "echo \"username=$username\" > /etc/smbcredentials"
ssh root@${dssAssocArray[$key]} "echo \"password=$password\" >> /etc/smbcredentials"