Access remote directory in shell script

Question

I have a shell script that accepts directory inputs. One of the directories I want to process is at a remote location. I am able to ssh into the remote host but I want to be able to reference the remote directory in a similar manner as a UNC path on Windows (in Windows you can type "\[remote host][share]" and reference that path in batch files). Is there a clean way to do a similar thing with ssh on Unix? When I call the shell script, I want to be able to type something like:

./run_shell_script.sh ssh://<host>/<path>

instead of running extra commands just to process that one directory? This is being done on a list of directories in a loop, so I don't want to have special code for remote directories.

Well essentially it ends up calling a Perl script that accepts directory inputs. It parses log files and generates a report about them. — user1040229
– user1040229, Commented Feb 27, 2013 at 19:15
the directory has log files in it? im asking to know if it's a valid thing what you what, sound weird to me and maybe there is another solution — martriay
– martriay, Commented Feb 27, 2013 at 19:17

Dmytro Sirenko · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-27 20:13:10Z

1

One of possible solutions is to parse the URI like this:

_uri=ssh://host/path/to/file
_host=`echo $_uri | sed 's|^ssh://\([^/]*\)/.*$|\1|'`
_dir=`echo $_uri | sed "s|^ssh://$_host/\(.*\)\$|\1|"`

and then just to use these variables to ssh:

scp $_host:$_dir $local_dir

Also, sshfs may be interesting for you: it allows to mount a remote host into a directory on the local machine without the NFS administration burden and even root privileges.

answered Feb 27, 2013 at 20:13

Dmytro Sirenko

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