Re: Failure exporting with emacs --batch

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Herbert Sitz <hesitz@gmail.com> wrote:

> Herbert Sitz <hesitz <at> gmail.com> writes:
> > 
> > Not sure, but I do something similar with a single --eval:
> > 
> >     --eval '(progn (find-file "filename") (org-export-as-html-and-open 3) )'
> > 
> 
> Except my version has double quotes for --eval argument and backslashes before
> embedded quotes:
> 
>      --eval "(progn (find-file \"filename\") (org-export-as-html-and-open 3) )"
> 
> 

That doesn't matter here: both of the above should work fine in a bash
(or similar) shell environment. I prefer the single quote style in
general, since it allows me to leave everything else unchanged[fn:1].

But shell quoting is a minefield: when you have to quote *parts* of an
expression and leave other parts unquoted so that the shell can get to
them (e.g. to evaluate shell variables and `...` or $(...) constructs),
life starts to get difficult - and that's just the beginning[fn:2].

Nick

Footnotes:

[fn:1] ...unless there is a single quote in there. If I'm quoting lisp code
       that has a single quote, I generally write (quote foo) instead of 'foo,
       in order to avoid the quote mess. And often I'll just add a function
       to my minimal .emacs, so I can just write 
       
           ... --eval '(foo)' ...

       on the command line: when writing foo, I don't have to worry about
       shell quoting rules.

[fn:2] Kernighan and Pike, in their "The Unix Programming Environment",
       have an example on p. 128 where they remark: "The remarkable
       sequence of quote characters is required to capture the date in a
       string in the middle of the awk program." Worth taking a look if
       you have the book available nearby.