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Re: new module 'system-quote'


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: new module 'system-quote'
Date: Tue, 08 May 2012 23:23:02 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120430 Thunderbird/12.0.1

On 05/08/2012 10:46 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
Can you be more specific in your question?  Are you asking whether any
byte stream is allowed in the command-line arguments?

The basic idea is that we're trying to emulate a function
like execvp, which takes an array of C strings and which
does not care about encoding.  On a host that doesn't have
fork+execvp we are taking the array and quoting it suitably
for popen or for system.  In POSIX this cannot be done
portably, since the arguments to popen/system must be encoded
suitably for the current locale (typically UTF-8 these days)
and encoding errors are not allowed.  Presumably the code will just
put the bytes into the string and hope for the best; often
in POSIXish environments it will work despite the encoding
error.

My assumption is that Windows is similar.  The main
reason I'm asking, I suppose, is that the issue should
probably be documented.



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