Passing arguments to shell commands

If you want to insert values into a command line (to be run by an exec resource, for example), they often need to be quoted, especially if they contain spaces. The shellquote function will take any number of arguments, including arrays, and quote each of the arguments and return them all as a space-separated string that you can pass to commands.

In this example, we would like to set up an exec resource that will rename a file; but both the source and the target name contain spaces, so they need to be correctly quoted in the command line.

How to do it...

Here's an example of using the shellquote function:

1. Create a shellquote.pp manifest with the following command:

$source = 'Hello Jerry'
$target = 'Hello... Newman'
$argstring = shellquote($source, $target)
$command = "/bin/mv ${argstring}"
notify { $command: }

2. Run Puppet:

t@mylaptop ~ $ puppet apply shellquote.pp
Notice: Compiled catalog for mylaptop.example.com in environment production in 0.02 seconds
Notice...