How to escape spaces in systemd unit files?

service systemd escaping

14,696

Solution 1

The correct way to generate paths in systemd is to use systemd-escape.

i.e.

~$ systemd-escape --path "/home/cobra/my service/start.sh"
home-cobra-my\x20service-start.sh

Yes / gets replaced with -

Solution 2

The obvious thing to do is to use double quotes.

ExecStart="/home/cobra/my service/start.sh"

You also should get rid of the start.sh script and move any necessary logic into the unit.

14,696

Cobra_Fast

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Cobra_Fast over 1 year
My unit file looks like this (already attempted to escape spaces as \x20 like the docs say):
```
[Unit]
Description=My Service

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/home/cobra/my\x20service/
ExecStart=/home/cobra/my\x20service/start.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
```
but when attempting to start it, it fails with the following message:
```
Failed at step CHDIR spawning /home/cobra/my service/start.sh: No such file or directory
myservice.service: main process exited, code=exited, status=200/CHDIR
```
Giving the path from this error message to stat returns:
```
  File: ‘/home/cobra/my service/start.sh’
  Size: 280             Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 903h/2307d      Inode: 4718912     Links: 1
Access: (0754/-rwxr-xr--)  Uid: ( 1000/   cobra)   Gid: ( 1000/   cobra)
Access: 2015-05-24 22:42:12.702657594 +0200
Modify: 2015-03-27 22:28:05.682531000 +0100
Change: 2015-05-24 22:40:58.830298787 +0200
 Birth: -
```
I cannot remove the spaces from the file name as the service I'm attempting to run requires them for some reason.

Where am I going wrong?
- hookenz almost 9 years
  
  Have you tried backslash space ("\ ") like the shell?
- hookenz almost 9 years
  
  It seems that spaces are used as a way of separating arguments. And googling this returns some ugly workarounds. Can you change the path? otherwise what about trying a non-space separated symbolic link as the path name which points to the real directory?
- hookenz almost 9 years
  
  Well I did find a tool called systemd-escape which allows you to create paths. It seems / gets changed to dash.
- leetNightshade almost 4 years
  
  Did you figure out how to get WorkingDirectory to work with spaces? Nothing is working for me.
Cobra_Fast almost 9 years

Putting quotes around it like you suggested makes the service fail completely: Failed to start myservice.service: Unit myservice.service failed to load: Invalid argument.
Cobra_Fast almost 9 years

The underlying error message seems to be Executable path is not absolute, ignoring: "/home/cobra..." myserivce.service lacks ExecStart setting. Refusing.
Cobra_Fast almost 9 years

Turns out quoting the executable path is supported since systemd version 218-147 (2014-12-19) and debian jessie is still sitting on 215-17. I just wrote the debian people a bugreport, we'll see what comes of it.
Michael Hampton almost 9 years

@Cobra_Fast Good luck with that. Of course I would never advise using Debian at all, but that's another discussion...
intcreator over 2 years

in my case I only needed to escape the path for the WorkingDirectory setting using the systemd-escape command before my service worked. is it best practice to escape paths used in the ExecStart setting with the command as well or does is it fine to just use quotes as long as it works?
hookenz over 2 years

I would use quotes if possible. But failing that, this tool. In the end you need to try something that works. In my opinion, systemd-escape is a funny tool that produces pretty odd looking escape sequences (dash for slash?? etc). The systemd team made some odd choices down the road. This is one of them.
Dominik over 2 years

In my case, paths returned by systemd-escape did not work. Replacing spaces with \x20 and no quotes worked.