groovy execute with parameters containing spaces

Question

How do I provide arguments containing spaces to the execute method of strings in groovy? Just adding spaces like one would in a shell does not help:

println 'ls "/tmp/folder with spaces"'.execute().text

This would give three broken arguments to the ls call.

Answer 1

The trick was to use a list:

println(['ls', '/tmp/folder with spaces'].execute().text)

Answer 2

Sorry man, none of the tricks above worked for me. This piece of horrible code is the only thing that went thru:

    def command = 'bash ~my_app/bin/job-runner.sh -n " MyJob today_date=20130202 " ' 
    File file = new File("hello.sh")
    file.delete()       
    file << ("#!/bin/bash\n")
    file << (command)
    def proc = "bash hello.sh".execute()                 // Call *execute* on the file

Answer 3

One weird trick for people who need regular quotes processing, pipes etc: use bash -c

['bash','-c',
'''
docker container ls --format="{{.ID}}" | xargs -n1 docker container inspect --format='{{.ID}} {{.State.StartedAt}}' | sort -k2,1
'''].execute().text

Answer 4

Using a List feels a bit clunky to me.

This would do the job:

def exec(act) { 
 def cmd = []
 act.split('"').each { 
   if (it.trim() != "") { cmd += it.trim(); }
 }
 return cmd.execute().text
}

println exec('ls "/tmp/folder with spaces"')

More complex example:

println runme('mysql "-uroot" "--execute=CREATE DATABASE TESTDB; USE TESTDB; \\. test.sql"');

The only downside is the need to put quotes around all your args, I can live with that!

Answer 5

did you tried escaping spaces?

println 'ls /tmp/folder\ with\ spaces'.execute().text