Unfortunately, expansion *is* performed by the remote shell, which is why
your shell quoting approach works (and is necessary).  There's really no way
around this, since the ssh client simply joins all of its trailing arguments
with spaces and sends this single string to the ssh server, which exec()s
$SHELL -c <string>.
On Nov 18, 2010 4:09 PM, "Michal Sojka" <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Mark Walters wrote:
>> I am experimenting with using notmuch remotely over ssh (as in the
>> NEWS file; i.e. with a script containing ssh user@host notmuch "$@")
>> This is mostly excellent but it seems to get confused by some queries.
>> For example those containing brackets or just consisting of *. I think
>> this is a problem with ssh spawning a shell on the remote machine
>> which doesn't like the brackets or *.
>>
>> Explicitly to reproduce the problem start notmuch with a remote
>> database using a script as above;
>> type * in the search box;
>> and emacs shows:
>> End of search results. (process returned 1)
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> you are right, that there are problems with the queries containing shell
> meta characters. AFAIK the probelm is not caused by the remote shell, as
> notmuch is there invoked directly by ssh, but by the shell invoking the
> ssh. I do not know precisely why, but the following script seems to work
> correctly even for the queries containing shell meta characters. It uses
> bash's printf extension to print shell-quoted version of a string.
>
> #!/bin/bash
> printf -v args "%q " "$@"
> ssh example.org notmuch $args
>
> -Michal
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