On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 11:18:16PM +0200, Jan Kanis wrote: > <elided> > AFAIK fish has no syntax to say "use the result of this command as a single > argument". Did I miss anything on this?
No. I'm pretty sure you have the right understanding. > <elided> > - Is there syntax that I missed that does this? Not that I'm aware of. > - If not, do we need any? I think it is an important feature to be able to > handle special characters in any output > - What kind of syntax would do? I'm not sure a new syntax is the ideal fix here, although it's a possible one. The real 'evil' is the array handling itself. For example: > echo 1 2\n3\n\n4 1 2 3 4 > set -l var (echo 1 2\n3\n\n4) > set | grep \^var var '1 2' '3' '' '4' > echo $var 1 2 3 4 > echo "$var" 1 2 3 4 Notice how fish handily split the resulting string at newlines into separate array elements, and then expanded the result using spaces. For the typical case of processing data from line-oriented utilities like sed, this is exactly what you do /not/ want, as the simple act of storing data into a variable and retrieving it changes the data. You may be wondering what the point of the last two echo commands are. For the first, fish expands $var to "'1 2' '3' '' '4'", which echo then happily prints, while for the second, fish formats to "1 2 3 4" first. The first form can usually be handled with xargs (although this ideally wouldn't be necessary), but the second is broken any way I look at it. However, because there's no sane way to pipe the data to xargs (you weren't thinking of using echo, were you?) after retrieving it from a variable, you're reduced to the annoying hack you thought up earlier. Well, unless you decided to forego variables and instead dump everything into temporary files and use xargs -a ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-devcon-copy2 _______________________________________________ Fish-users mailing list Fish-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users
