Nested double quotes won't work in my bash script?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

In a bash script I have:

LSCMD="find /project/media/ -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -name \"files*pkg\""
ALL_PACKAGES=$( $LSCMD | sort 2>/dev/null)

But I get nothing returned. It's just all blank. If I run the find command in a terminal, I get dozens of hits.

I figure it's the way how I'm escaping the double quotes, but after several google articles, I'm pretty sure it's allowed in bash. I even tried single quotes, 'files*pkg', but that didn't work either.

Any help?

Thanks!

2

What happens when you use set -x option?

3

Just don't use the escaped double quotes at all. Try without them and it will fly.

4

You cannot quote quotes and expect the shell to unquote them for you. When you execute $LSCMD, it takes those quotes literally. Leave them out...

You might also be in for another surprise -- $LSCMD will still substitute wildcards -- everywhere, because quotes have no meaning inside it. So if you have a file named 'files2pkg' in the current directory, it can shove that in instead of files*pkg. You can turn this off with set -f, so try this:

LSCMD="find /project/media/ -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -name files*pkg"

set -f # Prevent * from expanding when $LSCMD splits.
ALL_PACKAGES=$( $LSCMD | sort 2>/dev/null)
set +f # Turn * expansion back on

Another thing you could do is use a function instead of storing things in a string. You wouldn't need to do any special quoting of anything, it'd just be code as usual.

lscmd() {
        find /project/media -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -name "files*pkg"
}

ALL_PACKAGES=$( lscmd | sort 2>/dev/null )