Bash ssh for loop - env variable issue

Question

When using a bash for loop and ssh'ing to multiple machines the hostname variable is not updated to be the name of the machine I've ssh'd into.

What am I missing here?

"A", "B", "C" are replaced with names of actual machines and the speech marks removed in the actual execution.

for node in "A" "B" "C" ;
do
    ssh $node "echo $node $HOSTNAME is alive"  ;
done

In the example above $node is correctly outputted but $HOSTNAME is the name of the machine which I SSH from.

sat · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-11 10:49:04Z

2

Use single-quotes:

for node in "A" "B" "C" ;
do
    ssh $node 'echo $HOSTNAME is alive';
done

If you need to pass $node,

ssh [email protected] 'echo ' $node ' $HOSTNAME is alive'

If you use double-quotes, then you are passing the current machine's HOSTNAME value to a remote machine.

edited Apr 11, 2016 at 10:49

answered Apr 11, 2016 at 10:38

sat

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1 Comment

sat Over a year ago

@IanWatson, If this answer helped to solve your problem, Click the tick (check mark) on left under the vote arrows to accept the answer (meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251078/…)

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