Re: quoting and parentheses in ExecResult?

[Mark Burgess]

The problem of having a parenthesis in the middle of a string should not
be present in the current version, but of course I can be wrong.

On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 09:42 +0200, Knut Auvor Grythe wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 07:56:58AM +0200, Mark Burgess wrote:
> >> Well, when I say *exactly* I mean:
> >> 
> >>> $(dollar)/&.conf/g\"")>
> >
> > But this does not have balanced quotes or parentheses, so it doesn't
> > make much sense to me. You can't have a semi-quoted exoression
> > in any language..
> 
> The problem is, as far as I can see, this:
> 
> You have your weird oneliner with parentheses in it:
> 
>   someresult = ( ExecResult(/bin/sh "/bin/echo baz|/bin/sed -e 
> \"s/^\(.*\)$/&.conf/g\"") )
> 
> cfengine starts parsing it, and finds "ExecResult(". Okay, it thinks,
> It'll Have to find the matching parenthesis. So it scans through the
> string until it finds one. It finds one in the middle of the oneliner,
> about here:
> 
>   ExecResult(/bin/sh "/bin/echo baz|/bin/sed -e \"s/^\(.*\)$/&.conf/g\"")
>                                                           ^
> You'll notice that the string he is qouting is the remainder of his
> oneliner, right after the parenthesis. 
> 
> As far as I can see, this would all be avoided if you were allowed to
> quote the argument to ExecResult. That way, it wouldn't matter what was
> in the argument, as long as it was quoted and the quotes inside it were
> escaped. In other words, like this:
> 
>   someresult = ( ExecResult("/bin/echo \"this is a string (with parentheses) 
> for testing\"")
> 
> I have not tested this, but I believe Steve said that wouldn't work. 
> 
> Also without having tested, I believe this hack would work:
> 
>   control:
>     command = ( "/bin/echo \"this is a string (with parentheses) for 
> testing\"" )
>     someresult = ( ExecResult($(command)) )
> 
> It would be very nice to be able to write that in a single line,
> especially since it seems you are allowed to quote the arguments to
> functions in groups now. Being allowed to in groups is excellent, but it
> would be even better if it was consistent :-)
> 
> PS: I have no idea about how the parser really works here, and have done
>     no testing what so ever, simply assumed that what others say is
>     correct. If I say something wrong here, please forgive me.
>