Re: Can't stop find-grep-dired when using Cygwin for the inferior process - bug in shell-quote-argument?

[Lennart Borgman]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> Lennart Borgman wrote:
> > In any case the command string that is built and send to CMD does not 
> > work. Here I am using the GnuWin32 port of find, version 4.2.20. Find 
> > complains about the first -exec:
> >
> >    find . \( -type f -exec grep -q -e "message" {} \;  \) -exec ls 
> > -ld {} \;
> >    find: missing argument to `-exec'
> >
> > Stepping through shell-quote-argument it I can see that it tales the 
> > 'windows-nt path so that should be ok. There is only one call to 
> > shell-quote-argument involved and that is from find-grep-dired.
> > How should the above command look in this case? I am not very 
> > familiar with find. Perhaps is it not possible to give this command 
> > with CMD.EXE?
>
> I haven't tried it myself, but I think the following will work with 
> cmd.exe and a native port of GNU find:
>
> find . ( -type f -exec grep -q -e "message" {} ; ) -exec ls -ld {} ;
>
> The problem appears to be that although the string to pass to grep is 
> passed to shell-quote-argument, other parts of the expression have 
> hard-coded backslashes. However, passing them to shell-quote-argument 
> will introduce extra double-quotes on Windows, and I am not sure 
> whether that will work or not.

Thanks, that expression works with the GnuWin32 port of GNU find and 
CMD.exe.

To remove the bugs I suggest the following approach:

1) A new function quote-special-characters that will quote characters 
like (); if it is a unix style shell.

2) A new function w32-shell-is-unix-style that looks at shell-file-name.

3) A new variable w32-unix-style-shells that have a list of regexps for 
the function in 2 to use for matching shell-file-name

4) Use 2 in 1 and in shell-quote-argument

How about this approach?


BTW the doc string for find-grep-dired is incorrect in several ways.