Re: [Nmh-workers] Redoing argument processing

[Paul Fox]

ken wrote:
 > Last year there was a discussion on nmh-workers about why you can't have
 > a moreproc like "less -f".  See the thread here:
 > 
 > http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2012-05/msg00140.html
 > 
 > After some discussion, I think we settled on this:
 > 
 > - If "proc" has no spaces or shell metacharacters, treat normally.
 > - If "proc" has spaces in it, space-split it and have each word put into
 >   it's own index in the argv[] array.
 > - If "proc" contains shell metacharacters, send it to /bin/sh -c
 > 
 > The last one is actually trickier than I first thought.
 > 
 > A lot of nmh stuff wants to add arguments to an existing argv[] array.
 > We could pass that built-up argv array into the subroutine that takes care
 > of that (I'm calling it argsplit()) and have it return the formatted argv[]
 > array, but I'm wondering what the last case would look like.  I thought
 > at first that maybe we could do:
 > 
 > /bin/sh -c 'proc arg1 arg2 arg3'
 > 
 > and so on, but that would involve an extra level of shell interpretation.

i'm not clear on what's so wrong with the above.  i assume proc would
be expanded, so you'd end up with
    /bin/sh -c 'less -aics arg1 arg2 arg3'
or
    /bin/sh -c '~pgf/foo arg1 arg2 arg3'

i'm missing the "extra level of interpretation" you're thinking of.

paul

 > 
 > I then thought about
 > 
 > /bin/sh -c 'proc "$@" arg1 arg2 arg3
 > 
 > Only problem with that is that "arg1" gets put into $0, which doesn't get
 > expanded by $@, so it should really be:
 > 
 > /bin/sh -c 'proc "$@"' dummyarg arg1 arg2 arg3
 > 
 > What do others think about this?  Anything I'm missing?
 > 
 > --Ken
 > 
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 > https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers

=---------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 28.9 degrees)