systemd-escape — Escape strings for usage in system unit names
systemd-escape [OPTIONS...] [STRING...]
systemd-escape may be used to escape strings for inclusion in systemd unit names. The command may be used to escape and to undo escaping of strings.
The command takes any number of strings on the command line, and will process them individually, one after the other. It will output them separated by spaces to stdout.
By default this command will escape the strings passed,
unless --unescape is passed which results in the
inverse operation being applied. If --mangle a
special mode of escaping is applied instead, which assumes a
string to be already escaped but will escape everything that
appears obviously non-escaped.
The following options are understood:
--suffix=¶Appends the specified unit type suffix to the
escaped string. Takes one of the unit types supported by
systemd, such as ".service" or
".mount". May not be used in conjunction with
--template=, --unescape or
--mangle.
--template=¶Inserts the escaped strings in a unit name
template. Takes a unit name template such as
foobar@.service May not be used in
conjunction with --suffix=,
--unescape or
--mangle.
--path, -p¶When escaping or unescaping a string, assume
it refers to a file system path. This enables special
processing of the initial "/" of the
path.
--unescape¶Instead of escaping the specified strings,
undo the escaping, reversing the operation. May not be used in
conjunction with --suffix=,
--template= or
--mangle.
--mangle¶Like --escape, but only
escape characters that are obviously not escaped yet, and
possibly automatically append an appropriate unit type suffix
to the string. May not be used in conjunction with
--suffix=, --template= or
--unescape.
-h, --help¶--version¶Escape a single string:
$ systemd-escape 'Hallöchen, Meister' Hall\xc3\xb6chen\x2c\x20Meister
To undo escaping on a single string:
$ systemd-escape -u 'Hall\xc3\xb6chen\x2c\x20Meister' Hallöchen, Meister
To generate the mount unit for a path:
$ systemd-escape -p --suffix=mount "/tmp//waldi/foobar/" tmp-waldi-foobar.mount
To generate instance names of three strings
$ systemd-escape --template=systemd-nspawn@.service 'My Container 1' 'containerb' 'container/III' systemd-nspawn@My\x20Container\x201.service systemd-nspawn@containerb.service systemd-nspawn@container-III.service