Shell Script: Passing Wrapper Parameters to Underlying Script

Question

I have created a wrapper which can execute a given script over SSH with following parameters

sshwrapper.sh <server> <script with path> <username> <password>

Now i want to invoke the following scripts:

start.sh param1 param2 param3 param4

stop.sh param1 param2 param3

using the same wrapper.

Is it possible to have a mechanism where after passing the essential parameters to wrapper script I can post remaining parameters to underlying script?

i.e. I would like to achieve following notation:

Examples:

sshwrapper.sh server start.sh username password param1 param2 param3 param4

should invoke

start.sh param1 param2 param3 param4

and

sshwrapper.sh server stop.sh username password param1 param2 param3

should invoke

stop.sh param1 param2 param3

in a generic manner.

Igor Chubin · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-31 09:56:20Z

4

Use shift and "$@":

SERVER="$1"
SCRIPT="$2"
USERNAME="$3"
PASSWORD="$4"
shift 4

"$SCRIPT" "$@"

Example:

$ cat sshwrapper.sh 
#!/bin/sh

SERVER="$1"
SCRIPT="$2"
USERNAME="$3"
PASSWORD="$4"
shift 4

echo "$SCRIPT" "$@"

$ ./sshwrapper.sh server stop.sh username password param1 param2 param3 
stop.sh param1 param2 param3

Using shift you can remove first arguments from command line and shift the rest:

$ set 1 2 3 4 5
$ echo "$@"
1 2 3 4 5
$ shift 3
$ echo "$@"
4 5

You see here that shift 3 removed first three arguments.

answered Jul 31, 2012 at 9:56

Igor Chubin

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1 Comment

Bharat Sinha Over a year ago

Excellent... I thought my question description was not clear enough but you exactly gave me something which i wanted. Thank you!!

dopplesoldner · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-31 10:19:06Z

2

I have used ssh to execute scripts on remote servers previously, but to make my life easy I set up public-key authentication to allow password-less access.

See this article for reference

http://macnugget.org/projects/publickeys/

You can execute remote scripts with parameters using the default ssh tool from the command line as follows

$ ssh user@server "script.sh param1 param2 param3"

Multiple commands can be executed as follows

$ ssh user@server "script1.sh param1 param2 param3; script2.sh param1 param2 param3"

E.g - Loginto a remote server and print date and get a list of running processes

$ ssh user@server "echo date; ps -ef | grep hello"

You can add the above logic to your script, assuming you want to call this as part your ssh-wrapper, or execute directly from the command line.

Just ensure you use "double quotes" instead of 'single' in the ssh section.

answered Jul 31, 2012 at 10:19

dopplesoldner

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1 Comment

Bharat Sinha Over a year ago

+1. username, password was mentioned just to show that some parameters to be used by the wrapper. Anyways thanks for your response.

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