Need to have illegal characters in Nagios SERVICEOUTPUT and LONGSERVICEOUTPUT

Question

I have a Nagios check_log style perl script that is called via check_by_ssh. The log file entries can contain characters like '>' and '$', which are dangerous and not allowed in SERVICEOUTPUT or LONGSERVICEOUTPUT. The output is stripping these characters making the alerts hard to read. Is there a workaround for escaping characters in SERVICEOUTPUT, or an option to tun on this dangerous activity?

Answer 1

Remove the characters from the illegal_macro_output_chars config option.

Answer 2

Try escaping the output with a perl function. Without the scripts I can't provide a solution to you but here is an example:

  sub esc_chars {
  # will change, for example, a!!a to a\!\!a
     @_ =~ s/([;<>\*\|`&\$!#\(\)\[\]\{\}:'"])/\\$1/g;
     return @_;
  }

or to just remove them:

  sub esc_chars {
  # will change, for example, a!!a to a\!\!a
     @_ =~ s/([;<>\*\|`&\$!#\(\)\[\]\{\}:'"])//g;
     return @_;
  }