Quoting Authprogs is supplied the original client command through the environment variable SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND. Unfortunately, this means we loose things like where the parameter breaks are. The commands somecommand "/path/to/file one.doc" and somecommand "/path/to/file" "one.doc" would produce the same SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND string, somecommand /path/to/file one.doc For this reason, you should use quotes when necessary in your authprogs.conf file. When comparing the authprogs.conf entry and the SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND string, single and double quotes are dropped. This could mean you end up running a different command than the client is expecting because multiple commands could match when quotes are ignored. However, since the command you run is the one you specify in authprogs.conf, it is one that you have said is allowed. Thus it's not as much a security concern as it is an unexpected-results concern. Not using spaces in filenames is the easiest way to avoid this potential bug. SSH_CLIENT Some versions of Bash do not export the (already exported) SSH_CLIENT environment variable. You can get around this by adding export SSH_CLIENT=${SSH_CLIENT} or something similar in your ~/.bashrc, /etc/profile, etc. See the following URL for more information: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2002-01/msg00096.html