Trouble connecting to dbisql with special characters

[Former Member]

I'm moving my production environment from Windows to Linux.
A shell script will be used to perform meta-data changes.

BUT
My DBA password has a single quote (') and an exclamation mark (!) in it.
And for the live of me, I can't get my shell script to connect.

Example. Say may password is
I,haven'tAnIdea!

I've tried escape characters:
dbisql -c "UID=DBA;PWD=I,haven\\'tAnIdea!;Server=pw02;ASTART=No"

I've tried placing my connection string in a file, with- , and without escape characters.
dbisql @connection.ini

I know the simplest would be to change my password. But that doesn't solve what has now become an obsession to solve!

[justin_willey]

which SQLA version?

[Former Member]

Apologies. Should have mentioned that. SQLAnywhere 16 on Ubuntu Linux 14.10

[Former Member]

There seems to be 2 layers of parsing you need to escape for. Quadruple up those "'" chars

My test with granting a password of

grant connect to ... Identified by 'abc''def'

I found I needed to submit the password as

"...;PWD=abc''''def;..."

HTH

[Former Member]

Thank you Nick. Will give it a try.

[jack_schueler]

I wrote an "argv" app in C a very long time ago that displays the command line arguments that are passed on to "main" using a variety of methods (argc/argv, Windows GetCommandLine and GetCommandLineW, etc.). This handy tool lets you see how command-line arguments are massaged by your shell and the C run-time. Very, very useful in cases like this when you need to understand just what the application is actually seeing.