Nested grep with SSH

I have a following Shell command which runs successfully:

sed -e "1,/^$(date -d -24hour +'%Y-%m-%d %H')/d" logfile | grep -A20 -B10 'Exception' | mail -s "Sample report" xyz@yourdomain

However, I have to SSH to a particular machine to run this. To avoid this, I modified it in following way which leads to the failure:

ssh myserver 'sed -e "1,/^$(date -d -24hour +'%Y-%m-%d %H')/d" logfile | grep -A20 -B10 'Exception' | mail -s "Sample report" xyz@yourdomain '

What is wrong with this command? How can I fix this?

Answer

Embed your code in a quoted heredoc to avoid needing to modify it (which is an error-prone process by nature):

ssh myserver 'bash -s' <<'EOF'
  sed -e "1,/^$(date -d -24hour +'%Y-%m-%d %H')/d" logfile 
    | grep -A20 -B10 'Exception' 
    | mail -s "Sample report" xyz@yourdomain
EOF

---

In the specific case here, the obvious reason that your original modifications failed was internal single quotes terminating the ones surrounding the code as a whole.

Specifically:

+'%Y-%m-%d %H'

…the first ' in that expression terminates the one opening before the command, so the space isn’t syntactically protected.

You could instead do the following, since your shell is bash:

ssh myserver $'sed -e "1,/^$(date -d -24hour +'%Y-%m-%d %H')/d" logfile | grep -A20 -B10 Exception | mail -s "Sample report" xyz@yourdomain'

$'' is an extension within which backslashes can escape single quotes (and also be used for other literals — n for a newline, t for a tab, etc), functionality not available with typical POSIX sh syntax.

By contrast, in POSIX sh, one can switch quoting types to embed a literal single-quote: 'foo'"'"'bar' to defines a string with both foo and bar single-quoted, and separated by a single literal single-quote between them — perfectly valid syntax, but not necessarily easy for readers unfamiliar with the idiom to process).