Hello fellow Org-mode users,
I have developed a sufficiently large bump on my forehead from banging repeated
against the wall and wonder if another pair of eyes (perhaps connected to a
more capable brain) might shed light on this conundrum.
I’m working on some literate DevOps where I need to list systemd units on an
Arch Linux box and have a list of novel services we want to inspect. I teed up
a named list and source block with a for loop, a call to systemctl and a bit of
awk to parse things into a tab-separated list for Org to generate a table.
The odd thing was I’d lose the first two rows every time I used :colnames with
my source block. I’ve managed to reproduce the issue down to this minimal
snippet:
#+name: list
- a
- b
- c
#+begin_src sh :var list=list :results output table :colnames '("Key" "Value")
for item in $list; do
echo -e "$item\t$item"
done
#+end_src
#+results:
| Key | Value |
|-----+-------|
| c | c |
Why does Org-mode only return a single row of Cs? What happened to the A and B
rows?
This works as expected:
#+begin_src sh :results output table :colnames '("Key" "Value")
for item in a b c; do
echo -e "$item\t$item"
done
#+end_src
#+results:
| Key | Value |
|-----+-------|
| a | a |
| b | b |
| c | c |
I’ve run into issues with for loops inside source blocks combined with pipes
and executables that swallow stdin in the past, but this seems too simple to be
misbehaving.
I hope it’s not some advice I’ve long ago added to my Emacs config. Has anyone
else noticed similar with Emacs 30.1 and Org-mode 9.7.34?
GNU Emacs 30.1 (build 1, aarch64-apple-darwin24.6.0, NS appkit-2575.70 Version
15.6 (Build 24G84))
Org mode version 9.7.34 (9.7.34-??-8b15a0d0b @
/Users/jcf/.config/emacs/.local/straight/build-30.1/org/
https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/commit/26a5ad72e161f53151e78580a62bcd0757a7bf40
And if anyone has any recommendations for a non-drowsy analgesic…
All the best,
--
James Conroy-Finn
www.invetica.co.uk
