Bob Hiestand wrote:
Question one:
Is there a way to achieve execution of system commands without using
the shell? Here I'm thinking (for example) of, in perl, the
difference between using a single argument to exec() and using
multiple arguments. In the first version, shell characters are
expanded, in the second, they are not.
If there is no such functionality currently, is this a planned
feature? I believe that such a feature would make writing portable
plugins easier.
AFAIK, the only way to execute an external program from Vim with no
shell wrapping is to set the 'shell' option itself to the program name.
There may be drawbacks and pitfalls to that approach, though.
Question two:
Is there a way to set the buffer name without the name being subject
to shell metacharacter expansion? As far as I know, only :edit,
:split, :new, :write, and :file allow setting the buffer name, and
those all apply shell expansion. I know that characters can be
escaped, but that involved knowledge of which characters are
significant on each platform and again leads to unportable code (or
highly complex code that attempts to be portable by taking each system
into account). I would like a function to set the buffer name
(potentially for a buffer specified by number) or for the '%' register
to be writable.
Thank you,
bob
A buffer name is usually a (potential) file name. Which characters are
allowed in a filename is system-dependent. On Dos and on 16-bit Windows,
only 8+3 names are allowed (with no embedded spaces). On Unix, case is
usually significant while on Windows it usually isn't. And so on.
Also, Windows versions of Vim expand wildcards, while Unix versions
leave the expansion (except for ** which is a Vim-specific extension) to
the shell.
The buffer name can also be set by ":saveas", ":view", ":sview"... I'm
not sure I got them all. I expect all of these to also expand, for
instance, environment variables. ":saveas" is (IIUC) equivalent to
altering the current buffer's name then writing it under the new name.
If the new name already exists, ":saveas filename" will fail but
":saveas! filename" will succeed (unless of course there is a further
write-error, such as a "disk full" condition).
IIUC, all Vim's internal file-related commands accept a "unix-like"
filename syntax, and Vim translates it if necessary to the OS's syntax:
e.g., when Vim for Windows receives the command ":view
$VIMRUNTIME/vimrc_example.vim" (with an environment variable and using a
forward slash as separator) the string it passes to the Windows "file
open" function will be something like "C:\Program
Files\vim\vim70\vimrc_example.vim" (without the quotes and with a
terminating null byte IIUC, but also with the environment variable
resolved and, most important, with backslashes as separators).
Similarly, in Vim for Windows embedded spaces are backslash-escaped (as
in Unix), even though the Windows syntax is not to use any embedded
escaping but to wrap the whole name in double quotes.
If you want to build "portable" names for newly-created files, then
(assuming you can disregard pre-Win32 Dos-like systems) I suggest
limiting yourself to lowercase letters, digits, underscore and period.
Some systems allow more than that (and some OS versions accept Unicode
non-ASCII characters in filenames) but I believe that with [0-9a-z_.]
you can be fairly certain that your filename will be legal "almost
everywhere", and that different names will refer to different files.
Best regards,
Tony.
