ssh'ing to a host and executing a command not working correctly

Question

I have the following command:

ssh $USER@$HOST "ls /ops/pkg/ec/`grep "PKRTS" /ops/pkg/ec | awk '{print $1}'`* > /tmp/tmp_file"

What the above SHOULD do..is, ssh to the host then execute the command. The command should first execute the grep and awk between the back ticks, and generate a file name, then ls using that filename* and write that data to a temp file.

However, it executes the grep and awk before even SSH'ing and the command that goes to the server is simply an "ls /ops/pkg/ec/* > /tmp/tmp_file" since the grep and awk return nothing on the local machine.

Any ideas how to get around this?

Answer 1

It's a quoting problem. Backticks get interpreted inside double quotes, so you have to enclose your command in single quotes. You then have to do some more work related to the awk script quoting:

ssh $USER@$HOST 'ls /ops/pkg/ec/$( awk "/PKRTS/ {print \$1}" /ops/pkg/ec )* > /tmp/tmp_file'

You may have to experiment with the number of backslashes to protect the dollar sign in the awk command.

Note my comment to you above: is /ops/pkg/ec a file or directory? If it's a directory then grep "PKRTS" /ops/pkg/ec is probably not what you want.