3
kobenz
173d

Today I've had the pleasure of wrapping my brain around shell-quoting in all its insane glory

Comments
  • 4
    Cool! But it's quite straightforward..

    - ´ -- legacy af, never use them
    - ' -- shell won't touch anything inside, ie you will have what you have. No interpolation, no nothing
    - " -- shell will interpolate whatever shell expressions it finds inside

    there's not much more to it than that...
  • 2
    i like that
  • 0
    @retoor babe can we have schlex

    (that was a joke)
  • 0
    @netikras what do «» quotes do?
  • 0
    @kiki not quotes. Angle brackets. They are stream redirection operators, much like in c++.
  • 0
    @netikras those are Cyrillic кавычки-ёлочки, and I doubt they are part of any C++ spec. Did you mean >>?
  • 2
    @kiki there's a variety of its uses. Single > ensures an empty file and streams stdout into it. Double >> -- ensures a file and does thd same [not necessarily empty, ie O_APPEND -- appends to a gile if it already exists].

    < -- streams file contents into stdin [for some command].

    <<< -- streams following string contents into stdin. So you can compile some input in your script into a ctring and feed itninto some command's stdin.

    << -- allows you to compose a literal multiline string and feed it into stdin; terminated by a customizable terminator [immediately following the << notation]. Also called Heredocs

    <(command) -- translates into a command's stdout file [in the /proc filesystem]. I often use it for ´diff´, as it only accepts files and I sometimes need to diff command outputs
  • 0
    @kiki yes, that's what I meant. I assumed a genuine qn with a typo, not a troll question
  • 0
    @netikras oh come on, this wasn't even trolling 😅 just a bad joke
  • 0
    You know how ' are used to keep shell from touching the containing string in any way, right?

    What effed me up is that in bash, if you prepend the first apostrophe with a dollar sign, it overrides that and turns on escape sequence translation within the string

    $ echo 'foo\nbar'
    foo\nbar
    $ echo $'foo\nbar'
    foo
    bar
  • 1
    @netikras (stuff...) literally means "run wtv the fucks in there" , { stuff... } does the same with the added "don't you touch my shit"
  • 0
    @retoor I usually do `<c-r>=lua string.format("%q", [[some 'nasty"stringfuck/\]])`
  • 0
    Though 'read' instead of "run" fits best
  • 0
    @kobenz not just that. () runs in a subshell, meaning once you leave (), any variables or whatever you set/export inside parentheses will no longer be available outside them.

    {} is a simple code block with full access to 'parent' scope/vars/envs. {} is just a convenience allowing you to run multiple commands/subscript as one unit and treat it as such [pipe stdout/err/in, handle exit code]
  • 0
    @kobenz why do you say {} is 'dont touch my shit'? I'd say it's the other way around, unless we mean different things
  • 0
    @netikras cuz `()` is an actual operator not just syntax
  • 0
    @retoor I guess... :)

    using subshells I have implemented multithreading in bash. It's a powerful tool. So why not...
  • 0
    @retoor I have a webserver built in bash. Though it's single-threaded, didn't invest more time in it :)
  • 0
  • 0
    @retoor shellcheck?

    Though I don't use it.

    And I've developed my own scripting style over time that works very well for my needs
  • 0
    @retoor yupp. Useful for libs. Function names can contain :, it makes scripts much more maintainable as you know which lib owns that fn
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