How can I run arbitrarily complex command using sudo over ssh?

A trick I use sometimes is to use base64 to encode the commands, and pipe it to bash on the other site:

MYCOMMAND=$(base64 -w0 script.sh)
ssh user@remotehost "echo $MYCOMMAND | base64 -d | sudo bash"

This will encode the script, with any commas, backslashes, quotes and variables inside a safe string, and send it to the other server. (-w0 is required to disable line wrapping, which happens at column 76 by default). On the other side, $(base64 -d) will decode the script and feed it to bash to be executed.

I never got any problem with it, no matter how complex the script was. Solves the problem with escaping, because you don’t need to escape anything. It does not creates a file on the remote host, and you can run vastly complicated scripts with ease.

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