Shell Programming and Scripting

Without escaping, the backticks would be evaluated locally; that was the reason you got the error message about the directory. I thought you said you had it working now, though.

Sorry for the confusion.

I tried executing just ls -l on the remote server. Actually the abc will wary from server to server, i have a list of servers which iam reading line by line and ssh to each of them and executing this

ssh X.X.X.X "for i in `ls -l /export/home/abc[12]|awk '{Print $9}'`|do cd $i; tar -cvf new.tar file1 file2; done "
bash: -c: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `|d'
bash: -c: line 1: `for i in |do cd ; ls -l; done '

Here iam putting abc[12] but ideally i want abc*
The content of file1 and file2 will vary between abc1 and abc2, thats why iam putting these directories in the loop.

Please let me know if this can be done.



Thanks again.

double quotes may be causing the commands to be interpreted by shell.
you may try ur code by placing single quotes inplace of double quotes.

Again, the backticks are being evaluated on your local system, and you should not be using them anyhow.

Code:

ssh X.X.X.X 'for i in /export/home/abc*; do cd $i; tar -cvf new.tar file1 file2; done'

The single quotes prevent $i from being replaced with the value of $i locally (presumably would result in an empty string, which isn't very useful).

You're amazing. It worked.

Thanks for your help.