[geeks] Shell quoting question...

[velociraptor]

I'm having some trouble with a cron job, I can't figure out how to
escape it to make it work...

The script takes an argument that is the name of a profile for use by
another application.  The sole purpose of my script is to wrap the app
and generate error mail if the run fails.

If the profile exists, the directory exists as well, so I am using
that as a way to ensure there's no errors in the profile name.
Unfortunately the profiles are generated by a web interface, so a
space in the profile name is converted to %20 in the directory name.
The CLI version of the application that processes the profile will
accept either the space or %20 when you execute the app in an
interactive terminal.

In my crontab entry:

00 05 * * * /export/home/nmiller/script "profile%20name" > /dev/null 2>&1

If I issue the above in an interactive shell, it works fine.

But in the cron log I see this:

sh /export/home/nmiller/script "profile

I tried escaping the %, e.g. "profile\%20name", but that just resulted
in a line in my cron log with my script's exit code for "bad
argument".

I suppose I could work around this by doing a transformation in the
script to check the directory name, but today's my last day, and I
still have a handful of other things to beat into submission before
5:30pm.

Cluebats appreciated...

=Nadine=