Using ! exclamation mark in Nagios CFG files?

[AlanSommerville]

I know that NAGIOS uses the ! mark character in CFG files as a seperator. Example:

check_command check_win_disk1!C!80!90!12480

The issue I have is my company uses the ! character in our SMTP community string. I need to populate this string as an argument when running a command:

define service{
use generic-service
host_name my_server_name
service_description DELL_OPENMANAGE_STATUS
check_command check_dell_openmanage!mycommun!tystring!dellom
normal_check_interval 3
retry_check_interval 1
}

Is there a special character I can use to get it to treat the ! as a character rather than a seperator? I've tried "", //, '', etc... Also checked google but can't get an answer anywhere. Anyone know? Appreciate any assistance in advance.

[AlanSommerville]

I found a work around for this which was to define my string with the ! character as a user variable in "RESOURCES.CFG"

ie $USER2$ = mycommun!tystring

In my code below I then changes the line to:

check_command check_dell_openmanage!$USER2$!dellom

Would still be interested to know if there are any escape characters which could also be used.

[jsmurphy]

I believe the escape character is backslash \ as it is in most programming/scripting languages... I think you can also use single quotes around whole strings ' '. It's been too long since I last tried to escape something, if you decide to try these I'd be interested to know if they work as I remember.