Re: Mangled argument vector choking on spaces?

[Fotis Georgatos]

Hi David,

(this is a belated reply :)

On Jan 1, 2015, at 11:57 PM, <address@hidden> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Basically, ` ` becomes `_space_` and so on, for many more potentially tricky 
>> characters.
>> The aim was to have freedom in relation to packages/filenames. It seems to 
>> work OK! (*)

> 
> That is an interesting idea. I do worry that it too easily collides with 
> normal names. Perhaps a double underscore before and after the key word would 
> counter that problem.

Double underscores indeed would reduce the probability of human 
misunderstanding;

However, the transformation is unambiguous already once it is *known* if a 
string 
is in its expanded form or not, since all underscores themselves are also 
expressed; see:
https://github.com/hpcugent/easybuild-framework/blob/master/easybuild/tools/filetools.py#L87

> You still need to generate the correct values in makefiles and elsewhere. But 
> clearly the first step is to have an unambiguous representation.

Exactly, that is the point. The whole aim of that function was to permit
a representation that has the best chance of success across different situations
(fi. name ` Ήλεκτρον ` would be transformed sufficiently, to make it nicely 
usable).

<debate zone>
With all their great benefits, Unix shells have forced upon as a view of the 
world
whereby arbitrary limitations of build processes are always faced as 
after-thoughts.
May be one day we will be able to run complex builds w/out worrying on 
directory names...
</debate zone>

best,
Fotis

-- 
echo "sysadmin know better bash than english" | sed s/min/mins/ \
  | sed 's/better bash/bash better/' # signal detected in a CERN forum