Re: [Qemu-devel] [Bug 1022331] Re: -cpu ? causes confusion when directory has 1-character length filenames

[Stefan Weil]

Am 09.07.2012 10:27, schrieb Daniel Berrange:
> On Sun, Jul 08, 2012 at 11:45:34PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On 8 July 2012 20:44, Michael Tokarev<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > > Please take this to your shell.  The queston mark is a metacharacter for
> > > any *nix shell, you should just quote or backslash it.  The same
> > > question mark is not special on windows.
> >
> > I think it's a legitimate complaint to say that this is not fantastically
> > friendly UI on QEMU's part though. (I've been bitten by it myself and
> > I've been dealing with Bourne shells for over a decade.), Picking a
> > string that requires metacharacter-quoting in the major shell most
> > people use is just a silly choice.
> >
> > I've thought before that we ought to make sure we have synonyms (eg 'help')
> > for all the list things that currently want '?'. Then we could mark '?'
> > as deprecated or present for back-compatibility only.

I fully agree.

> Or just introduce another character as an alternative to '?', eg '-'
> or even accept the string 'help' eg   "-cpu help"
>
> Daniel


What about "--cpu [list|help|?]"?

It is already possible to use "--cpu ?anystring" because the code
only tests the first character, but I don't know whether that was
intentional.

As Peter already wrote, there are more options which support '?'
today (e.g. the list of ethernet NICs), and all should use a similar
syntax.

Regards
Stefan W.

PS.
I'd also deprecate long command line options starting with a single '-'.