On 09/12/10 08:24, Ian Lynagh wrote:
Add showCommandForUser to process:System.Process http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4305
There are many programs (e.g. ghc and Cabal) which run other programs, and when run with -v want to show the user what they are running. The user then often wants to run the command by hand, in order to debug a problem, but this can be tricky when the command or its arguments include spaces or other characters treated specially by shells.
*Which* shells, though, can it run in? My particular example is I use "fish" shell on Linux, which has similar but not identical quoting-and-special-character rules to Bash. The convention in the Linux/Unix world these days, I believe (on the internet and otherwise) is to post commands in a format that works in Bash / POSIX sh / whatever works in most/all default Unix shells that currently exist. It looks like the patch's method of single-quoting everything and adding the usual trick to quote single-quotes ( '\'' ) should work fine for shell compatibility as well as user-readability. (Ignoring Windows conventions I'm not familiar with.) ( Csh/Tcsh looks somewhat hopeless to add compatibility with: e.g. even in single-quotes in scripts, '!' needs to be backslash-escaped*. Switching to using backslashes for everything instead of single-quotes would be way too ugly. * http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~uwe/lehre/unixffb/quoting-guide.html#para:csh-tcs... ) ...So, at least from the Linux side of things, +1. -Isaac