Why does xargs strip quotes from input text?
Here is a simplified example:
echo "/Place/='http://www.google.com'" | xargs echo
outputs
/Place/=http://www.google.com
Is there any way to work-around this? (xargs -0 doesn't help me)
Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityWhy does xargs strip quotes from input text?
Here is a simplified example:
echo "/Place/='http://www.google.com'" | xargs echo
outputs
/Place/=http://www.google.com
Is there any way to work-around this? (xargs -0 doesn't help me)
if you want xargs
to ignore quotes one of the good soultion can be the use of xargs
flag xargs -0
Directly from Man page OPTIONS
OPTIONS -0, --null
Input items are terminated by a null character instead of by whitespace, and the quotes and backslash are not special (every character is taken literally). Disables the end of file string, which is treated like any other argument. Useful when input items might contain white space, quote marks, or backslashes. The GNU find -print0 option produces input suitable for this mode.
I've checked on a GNU system that setting the delimiter to a specific value (like a newline) with -d
option (and not just -0
) would also cause xargs
not to treat the quotes etc specially:
-bash-4.3$ { echo "a'b'c"; echo d; } | xargs -d$'\n' echo
a'b'c d
-bash-4.3$ rpm -qf "$(which xargs)"
findutils-4.6.0.0.99.11a05-alt1.x86_64
-bash-4.3$ { echo "a'b'c"; echo d; } | xargs echo
abc d
-bash-4.3$
-0
but goes ahead to given an example using -d
instead. -d
as called out by the other answers works on GNU only, and -0
only works if the input can be provided with a NUL delimiter.
For GNU xargs, I found another solution in the manpage: explicitly specify delimiter to be '\n'. This turns off special handling for quotes:
--delimiter=delim, -d delim
Input items are terminated by the specified character. The specified delimiter may be a single character, a C-style character escape such as \n, or an octal or hexadecimal escape code. Octal and hexadecimal escape codes are understood as for the printf command. Multibyte characters are not supported. When processing the input, quotes and backslash are not special; every character in the input is taken literally.
So,
echo "/Place/='http://www.google.com'" | xargs -d'\n' echo
outputs
/Place/='http://www.google.com'
ksh93
$'...'
quoting operator that is not found in every shell implementation.
Dec 5, 2017 at 17:24
From the xargs
manual:
If you want an input argument to contain blanks or horizontal tabs, enclose it in double quotes or apostrophes. If the argument contains a double quote character (
"
), you must enclose the argument in apostrophes. Conversely, if the argument contains an apostrophe ('
), you must enclose the argument in double quotes. You can also put a backslash (\
) in front of a character to tell xargs to ignore any special meaning the character may have (for example, white space characters, or quotes).
This means you can escape quotes if the quotes are quoted themselves:
$ echo "/Place/=\'http://www.google.com\'" | xargs echo
/Place/='http://www.google.com'
will work but echo /Place/=\'http://www.google.com\' | xargs echo
will not.
"/Place/='http://www.google.com'"
, how can I properly escape it?
Jul 7, 2015 at 21:19
You could use GNU Parallel instead:
$ echo "/Place/='http://www.google.com'" | parallel echo
/Place/='http://www.google.com'
Then you do not have to do the quoting yourself.
Learn more: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1
I found another solution here https://stackoverflow.com/a/17468560/1795821 that suggests using sed
to escape quotes.
For example:
sh-3.2$ echo "/Place/='http://www.google.com'" | sed "s/\'/\\\'/g" | xargs echo
/Place/='http://www.google.com'
xargs
treats quotes and backslashes specially as part of the spec. Post what you are trying to do withxargs
instead.xargs -0
works for me here... Why doesn't it help you?