[RFC] Support of quoted string in argument of dump, restore and append commands.

Denis PILAT denis.pilat@st.com
Tue Dec 2 09:20:00 GMT 2008


Hello everyone,

In the actual implementation of dump/restore/append command, I found it 
was impossible to manage files that contains spaces.
Whereas some other commands like file, symbol-file, ...etc.. accept the 
handling of quoted arguments, dump/restore/append do not.

You'll find attached the file cli-dump.patch that implements all the 
above, allowing quoting arguments to these commands so allowing having 
spaces in file names and in any arguments. This implementation uses 
buildargv.

Then using restore command, I found that the "binary" argument was not 
documented in the "help restore command", I add it and change the 
gdb.base/help.exp as well.

Then I discovered that the gdb.base/dump.exp use this kind of command:
dump srec mem FILE START STOP
where the only the last argument can contains spaces. That is a little 
bit strange, why START should be a space less expression and STOP could 
contain whatever you want ?
Same remark for all similar command and for
restore FILE "binary" OFFSET START END
In the actual implementation, only END argument could contains complex 
expressions with spaces. Of course the actual testsuite has taken that 
into account and make complex expression only for the last argument.


My implementation treats all arguments with same rules, I'm using 
buildargv function that's pretty well for that. If user want to use 
spaces in any argument, he must use double or single quotes.
I add checking about the number of arguments and if user overpass it, 
gdb prints "Too much arguments." and does not execute the command.

Please give me some feedback on what I did,
I can also adopt the policy to parse the last argument like is was 
before, considering that all stuff after N-1 argument is to be 
considered as the last one.
May be I can add some more test in the testsuite as well ?

As you will see, I've removed lot of dead code in cli-dumps.c, may be 
you'd like that to be part of another patch !

Waiting for your feedback
Cheers

Denis PILAT / STMicroelectronics
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