Re: Shell quoting in Eshell (was: eshell-batch-file)

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 6/9/2024 12:15 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> ... The problem, in
> particular with the Eshell test suite, is that that the same utility
> functions are used with many different commands and many different
> situations, and so in general it is almost impossible to fix this
> inside the utility function which actually quotes the arguments,
> because the function doesn't know how will the command be called and
> even what are the arguments it is quoting.

I'll take a look at this in some more detail. I've tried to be cautious 
about this in the tests, but since I only have a GNU/Linux dev 
environment set up, it seems some mistakes have slipped through.

> Curiously, there is already eshell-quote-argument, but it doesn't
> produce the same effect as shell-quote-argument with 2nd arg non-nil,
> which is why in esh-proc-tests.el I couldn't use
> eshell-quote-argument.  Any idea why eshell-quote-argument is
> different?

Hmm, I'm not immediately sure, although I have a feeling that's a bug. 
In particular, 'eshell-quote-argument' doesn't quote parens, which seems 
like a problem since that's how you write Lisp forms in Eshell. Surely 
we'd want to quote those. I'll take a look though, and see if I can fix 
things so we can use 'eshell-quote-argument' in the tests at the right 
spots.

> In any case, I suggest at some point to discuss how to handle quoting
> in a more systematic way, because it was a cause of constant problems
> when I ran the Eshell tests today and fixed those which failed.

Thanks for all the fixes. I'll go through them and see if there are any 
subsequent improvements I should make. If you run into any similar 
problems in the future, feel free to ping me first and I can try to make 
the fixes on my end (so long as I'm available) so you don't have to.