Re: passing positional arguments to esyscmd

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Sergey Astanin wrote:
> Hello, everybody,
>
> I cannot figure out how to pass positional arguments of a macro to
> esyscmd. I tried googling but found no examples beyond simple calls like
> esyscmd(`date'). In my case the shell command depends on positional
> arguments: I want to write macro like _MY_MACRO(var1,var2) that expands to
> ``var1 : some-text-generated-using-var2'', where
> ``some-text-generated-using-var2'' is an output of my perl script
> ``./script.pl var2''.
>
> The first thing I tried was:
> m4_define(`_MY_MACRO', `$1 : 'm4_esyscmd(`./script.pl '$2))

here you are running m4_esyscmd(`./script.pl '`'), before adding it's
output to the definition of _MY_MACRO.  I assume you want to have
_MY_MACRO invocations incorporate an expansion of esyscmd() at each
call?

> It does not work, and the scipt diagnostics shows that it was called
> without any argument. I also tried m4_esyscmd(`./script.pl $2'),
> m4_esyscmd(./script.pl $2), but none of them worked.
>
> Though, if I write something like
> m4_define(`_MY_MACRO', `$1 : '(`./script.pl '$2))
> the shell command is displayed correctly: ``./script.pl var2''.
>
> So, I suppose, esyscmd expands its arguments in a different way, than that
> of a normal macros, or probably, the positional parameters are treated
> differently. The question is how I may call esyscmd and have all its
> arguments expanded.

Nope.  Positional parameters are expanded in the body of a macro before
anything in it is pushed back on the input stack.

> I would appreciate any clue or advise, or a workaround.

$ m4
define(`_MY_MACRO', `$1: esyscmd(`echo $2')')dnl
_MY_MACRO(arg1, arg2)
arg1: arg2

Works for me.

HTH,
        Gary.
--
Gary V. Vaughan      ())_.  address@hidden,gnu.org}
Research Scientist   ( '/   http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker           / )=   http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author   `(_~)_   http://sources.redhat.com/autobook

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