Re: [PATCH] Add shell-quasiquote.

[David Kastrup]

Jeff Clough <address@hidden> writes:

> Wolfgang Jenkner <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 21 2015, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>
>>> I guess patches to extend shell-quote-argument to cover more shells on
>>> Posix systems should be welcome, and should get higher priority than
>>> we thought.
>>
>> I beg to differ: IMHO, on Unix-like systems, there's no point for
>> `shell-command' and friends to support anything but /bin/sh, which is
>> certainly a Bourne shell and hopefully reasonably POSIX compliant.
>
> I think this might not be true, depending on what "a Bourne shell" means
> to some users. On many systems, /bin/sh is a symlink to whichever shell
> floats the vendor's goat.
>
> For example, on the Mint distribution of GNU/Linux, it's a symlink to
> dash. While dash is a variant of a variant of the Bourne shell, can we
> say with reasonable certainty that those variations don't impact
> shell-quote-argument? (I don't know what they are myself, just posing
> the question.)

If something is linked to /bin/sh, it's close enough to a Bourne shell
that its quoting semantics are very clear.  Too many reasonably portable
software depends on that.  This is what "system" is supposed to run.

Details may differ, but shell-quote-argument should not be affected.

-- 
David Kastrup