Re: Proposal to add /usr/bin/shquote

[Bruce Korb <bruce.korb%gmail.com@localhost>]

Alan Barrett wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Sep 2008, Robert Elz wrote:
> > My only reservation might be that while shell quoting is a very common
> > need, we also need quoting for other programs -
>
> I was thinking about that when I decided to use getopt to allow for the
> possibility of options in future.
>
> But it now seems to me that "shquote" is not a good name for a program
> that can also perform non-shell quoting.  Perhaps just "quote" instead
> of "shquote"?  It could take a "-t type" option defaulting to "-t sh",
> and the initial implementation might not support any types other than
> "sh", but the infrastructure could be provided.
>
> > the one I see most is for sed patterns - pkgsrc could really do with
> > that one, when you consider the number of times that it does stuff
> > like
> >
> >         sed 's/PREFIX/${PREFIX}/'
>
> Yes, I have also seen and worried about that pattern in pkgsrc.

As long as you are going to go to all this trouble, how about having
a depth option?  Someone alluded to it earlier where the arguments
get scanned once locally and again by a shell at the far end of
an rsh/ssh command.  So, ``-d 2'' would fix this.  Thank you!
Cheers - Bruce