Re: [Proposal] Why not add a "shell" procedure?

[Nala Ginrut <nalaginrut@gmail.com>]

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 10:37 PM, Nelson H. F. Beebe
<beebe@math.utah.edu> wrote:
> Nala Ginrut <nalaginrut@gmail.com> writes today about adding a
> function to return a string from a command executed by a shell,
> because (system "...") only returns the exit status of the last
> command.
>
> The one point that I think is important is the handling of whitespace.
>
> The Unix shells in their backquoted `cmd` and $(cmd) syntax normalize
> the output of cmd to replace runs of whitespace [ \n\r\v\t]+ by single
> spaces.
>
> For shell use, that is convenient.  However, inside guile, it may be
> more useful to preserve the whitespace as is, and particularly the
> line breaks.
>

Yes, I don't think we should handle whitespace for users either. And
the "shell" in Ruby dosen't too.
I think my implementation reflects this.

> A user who wants whitespace collapsed to single spaces can easily do
> so with a regexp substitution, and that could be facilitated by
> providing a standard guile library function to do the job
> consistently.
>

well, this could be interesting.
Anyway, I think we should have an inner way to run shell first.

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