Escape \ in nagios config files?

[Kevin Keane]

Actually, this is not just in Nagios; this is standard Unix escaping. 
And it's not really 3 \. Rather, what is going on is that standard Unix 
escaping is applied twice - first when parsing the config file, and 
again when passing the arguments to the plugin.

In Unix, normally when you put a \ anywhere, it escapes the following 
character. For instance, a \ before a space means "the next character 
isn't really a space, don't treat it as the end of the path". And a \ 
before a \ means "the second backslash isn't really an escape character, 
but rather I want a literal backslash". So in order to get a single \ in 
the plugin, on the command line you need to escape it with another \. 
You found that out when you ran check_nrpe2 from the command line.

Now when Nagios parses the config file, it uses the same escaping 
mechanism. So when you simply put \\ into the config file, Nagios 
interprets the first one as "escape" and the second one as "escaped to 
be literal" - thus, you'd end up with a single \ in the command line. 
But you wanted two \. So you need to tell Nagios to do the same thing 
twice: \\\\ -> \\ in the command line -> \ for the plugin to see.

And where you needed the plugin to actually see \\ (before the 
localhost), you need to do the same thing yet again, for a total of 
eight consecutive backslashes.

Janet Sullivan wrote:
> Of course, right after I sent that, I found a solution.  It seems I can
> use 3 \s to escape a \.  My path in the service definition becomes:
>
> \\\\\\\\localhost\\\\_definst_\\\\mp3\\\\mn_mp3_08_07\\\\streams
>
> ...and it works.   
>
> Is there a list of all the ways to escape special characters in Nagios?
> The only reason I came up with the three \ escape sequence was because I
> noticed that my \\\\localhost was being seen as \localhost in the error
> message.  I haven't found any mention of that sequence on google. :-/
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Janet Sullivan 
> Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 1:56 PM
> To: 'nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net'
> Subject: Escape \ in nagios config files?
>
> I want to check the disk space of a UNC path -
> \\localhost\_definst_\mp3\mn_mp3_08_07\streams
>
> >From the command line, I can check it fine (using check_nrpe2) if I
> escape each  \ like this:
>
> \\\\localhost\\_definst_\\mp3\\mn_mp3_08_07\\streams
>
> But when I try to use configure Nagios to check it, it strips out all
> the \ characters.  I've tried single quotes, double quotes, and escaping
> each \ - no luck.  How can I tell Nagios about this path in a service
> definition without it stripping out the special characters?  Is there an
> escape method I'm missing?  
>
>
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Kevin Keane
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