Re: [PATCH] specify arguments to debugee from commandline (second try)

[David Deephanphongs <deephan at telocity dot com>]

Thus spake Tom Tromey (tromey@redhat.com):

> David> I'm still not convinced that it's appropriate for /gdb/ to do
> David> the escaping - if it's being put into a script, it's much
> David> easier to do it in perl than C..
> 
<snip>

> 
> Requiring the caller to do the quoting means that scripts will never
> invoke gdb directly.  Instead I'll have to write another program to
> wrap gdb and quote the command line for me.
> 

I suppose that depends on what you are using to automate GDB...

Frankly, if you are going to automate it, you might as well use a command
file - it's just as easy.


> That seems needless, especially given that requiring interactive users
> to quote the command line will suck.
> 
> For instance, you can't type
> 
>     gdb foo -- ' a b c '
> 
> Instead you must type
> 
>     gdb foo -- '\ a\ b\ c\ '
> 
> I can't really call this intuitive or friendly.

I can understand that.. I generally don't like programs doing things
like that automatically for me, though... I always run into cases where
the program misinterprets what I want it to do.

Actually, though, unless you needed to preserve the correct # of spaces,
you could just escape the apostrophes.


<snip>
> 
> David> What characters need to be escaped, anyway?  It seems like it
> David> much differ from shell to shell.
> 
> On Unix it doesn't really differ very much.  For most common shells
> you can simply quote all the weird characters with `\'.
> 
> Tom

Wierd characters being what, precisely?  I'm tempted to just escape
everything that's not a letter or number..


Dave
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