How Bamboo processes task arguments and passes them to OS shell

Parsing arguments

When executing different Tasks, Bamboo attempts to tokenize value entered in Arguments field. The general rules are:

• white characters are argument separators,
• single and double quotes are used to preserve white characters in arguments.

This particular string

clean install -DpartiallyQuotedArgument1="Partially Quoted Argument" 'Fully Quoted Argument'

would be tokenized as

clean
install
-DpartiallyQuotedArgument1="Partially Quoted Argument" 
'Fully Quoted Argument'

Each line here represents a single argument that will be passed to shell.

Passing arguments to shell

Bamboo generally doesn't modify tokenized arguments before passing them to shell with one exception:

• on non-Windows OS arguments that are fully enclosed in single or double quotes will be stripped from those quotes.

This particular string

clean install -DpartiallyQuotedArgument1="Partially Quoted Argument" 'Fully Quoted Argument'

would be passed to Windows shell as

clean
install
-DpartiallyQuotedArgument1="Partially Quoted Argument" 
'Fully Quoted Argument'

but to Unix shell as

clean
install
-DpartiallyQuotedArgument1="Partially Quoted Argument" 
Fully Quoted Argument

FAQ

I want to pass double quotes with my argument to Unix shell.

Try this

'"Only external quotes will be stripped and double quotes will be preserved when passing this to Unix shell"'

My Maven Task doesn't work when I specify multiple targets in argument field

Make sure you haven't quoted the whole contents of Arguments field:

"clean install"

You should simply delete quotes

clean install