From: Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz>
To: Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: Bug in remote use of notmuch
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTin_2gWHg2omVdRwDbm8-m3FoJn6cvVakMRBnNEZ@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTin_2gWHg2omVdRwDbm8-m3FoJn6cvVakMRBnNEZ@mail.gmail.com>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.5-11-g48b5e00 (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.2.1
	(i486-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 22:08:59 +0100
Message-ID: <87wroa49w4.fsf@wsheee.2x.cz>
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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