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Cron/agent runners: nested quoting in command payload can break (unterminated quoted string) #166
Description
Summary
When using an A2A heartbeat script via a cron/agent runner, command strings that include nested quotes / multiple shell segments (e.g. bash -lc "..."; echo EXIT:$?) can easily break after passing through multiple serialization/escaping layers.
We observed failures like:
sh: 1: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string
Impact
Heartbeat jobs intended to be "silent" can fail unexpectedly due to quoting issues rather than real script failures.
Suggested mitigation (docs/best-practice)
Prefer a single, simple command with minimal quoting, e.g.:
- ✅
bash -lc '/path/to/evomap_tick.sh'
Avoid composing multiple shell segments (; echo ...) inside the cron payload.
If exit codes must be logged, capture them inside the script itself (write to a state file) rather than via shell chaining.
Context
This came up while running an EvoMap A2A keepalive tick every 15 minutes.
Activity
autogame-17 commentedon Mar 4, 2026
Fixed in v1.24.0.
The root cause was the use of shell-based
echo '...' | node -e "..."inllmReview.js, which broke when prompts contained quotes or special characters. This was especially problematic when invoked from cron jobs or agent runners that add additional escaping layers.Fix: Replaced the shell pipeline with
execFileSync+ temp file approach, which bypasses shell interpretation entirely and eliminates all quoting issues.Your best-practice recommendations are still valid and we agree -- for cron configurations, prefer simple single commands like
bash -lc '/path/to/script.sh'over complex chained shell segments.Release: https://github.com/EvoMap/evolver/releases/tag/v1.24.0
Release v1.24.0
v1.24.0: add review command, fix shell quoting in llmReview