On 2020-09-20 at 17:27, Gary Dale wrote:
I have the same bash script on two different Debian/Buster AMD64
servers. However on one it refused to run. I tracked it down quickly
to a variable substitution problem.
The line causing the problem reads: report="/root/clamscan-report"
On one server echo $report prints /root/clamscan-report while on
the other it prints "/root/clamscan-report".
Needless to say clamscan can't print to the latter. I fixed it by
removing the quotes on the one server but now the scripts are
different between the two servers, which isn't what I want.
Given the lack of spaces or other potentially-problematic characters in
the path, why not remove them on both servers? Will there potentially be
cases where the path is different, and such characters may be present?
More importantly, I don't understand why it refuses to remove the
quotes.
Where does this behaviour (keeping the quotes) get set?
First up: are you sure it's actually bash (rather than some other shell)
that's running the script in both cases?
Second, can you confirm that bash is the same version on both servers?
As reported by e.g 'bash --version'.
If both of those are confirmed, then it may be worth digging deeper. I'm
a bit reluctant to delve deep into the bash man page looking for
something like that without first ruling out other possibilities.
My first guess would be that one of the two might be using the shell
builtin command 'echo' and the other might be using /bin/echo, but
that's only a guess.