Using Thunderbird, how can one attach from command line a file containing commas (,) in its name?

Question

thunderbird -compose "attachment='$HOME/test test.txt'" works. thunderbird -compose "attachment='$HOME/test, test.txt'" does not work and gives a file does not exist error message.

This must be because of the way Thunderbird handles command line arguments; e.g.,

thunderbird -compose "to='[email protected]',attachment='~/file.txt'"

The compose arguments are separated by , and that must be why having a , in the file name breaks things. I cannot, however, think of a way to "escape" commas in the file name.

Note:

• In Thunderbird 3+, using the protocol file:// is not required any more.

Both

thunderbird -compose "attachment='$HOME/test test.txt'"

and

thunderbird -compose "attachment='file://$HOME/test test.txt'"

work.

Neither

thunderbird -compose "attachment='$HOME/test, test.txt'"

nor

thunderbird -compose "attachment='file://$HOME/test, test.txt'"

works.

Answer 1

Using the idea of URL encoding the file names suggested by @Etan Reisner (in a comment to my question above), I hacked a solution which I record here for the benefit of others in the community. In the snippet below, ${filename} is the full file name (including path) to be attached.

#!/bin/bash

# "A safe way to URL encode is to encode every single byte, even
# those that would've been allowed." This is done by first
# converting every byte to its 2-byte hex code using `hexdump' and
# then adding the prefix `%' to each 2-byte hex code pair using
# `sed'.
#
# Attribution: https://stackoverflow.com/a/7506695

filenameurlencoded=$(echo -ne "${filename}" | \
hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02x"' | \
sed 's/\(..\)/%\1/g')

filenamenopath="$(basename ${filename})"
emailsubject="${filenamenopath}"
emailbody="\"${filenamenopath}\" is attached."
emailattachment="file:///${filenameurlencoded}"

# Syntax of -compose command line option: double-quotes enclose
# full comma-separated list of arguments passed to -compose,
# whereas single quotes are used to group items for the same
# argument.
#
# Attribution: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments_(Thunderbird)

thunderbird -compose "subject='${emailsubject}',body='${emailbody}',attachment='${emailattachment}'"