Not able to pass basic auth headers in a dynamic curl cmd

Question

I am trying to run a dynamically generated curl command with basic authorization headers and store response code in a variable. below is my shell script. (say test.sh)

auth="--header 'Authorization: Basic abcdefghijkl'"
url="http://localhost:8080"
cmd="curl -s -o /dev/null -I -w &quot;%{http_code}&quot; -X GET ${url} ${auth}"
echo $cmd
code=$($cmd)
echo $code

but above command doesn't send the authorization header in the GET request.

To demonstrate it I have written a small nodejs http server and logging headers in it, see below.

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  console.log(req.headers);
  res.write('This is a sample response from server.\n');
  res.end();
}).listen(8080);
console.log("Server is listening on port 8080");

but on running test.sh via

bash test.sh

I get below output in shell:

"200""000""000"

and on server side i get below text in logs.

{ host: 'localhost:8080', 'user-agent': 'curl/7.54.0', accept: '*/*' }

There are two problems:

Basic auth header is not received on the server side.
Instead of 200 status-code I get "200""000""000" which is unexpected.

Can you please suggest what am i missing here?

Thanks in anticipation.

The way you're invoking curl is kinda peculiar.
Try curl --user name:password http://www.example.com instead — Artem S. Tashkinov, Jun 24 '20 at 14:33
Does this answer your question? How can we run a command stored in a variable? — guest, Jun 24 '20 at 14:34
The command is not being executed properly (because it's stored in a simple variable). IFS causes 'Authorization:, Basic, and abcdefghijkl' to be treated as separate arguments. curl interprets the last two as urls (they will fail to resolve and account for the two sets of 000). You could use a function, array, or eval as described in How can we run a command stored in a variable? — guest, Jun 24 '20 at 14:47

Not able to pass basic auth headers in a dynamic curl cmd

0 Answers0