keep raw for variable inputed argument#6426
Conversation
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nice - how does this affect the other scenarios that we documented on that hackmd document? i.e. is this going to break some existing functionality? |
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Sorry, I have only one mac, and did some manual tests for MacOS relative commands, all work fine for me. And I believe it doesn't affect any existing functionality |
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When I try to run the "before" example on Windows, I get "The system cannot find the path specified." Can you provide a simpler example? It is hard to understand what problem this PR is trying to solve. |
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I'm having the following output without this PR on Windows: And with this PR applied: Seems the same to me. But it might be that I'd suggest writing a simple one-liner in C or Rust that prints out the args you pass to it. And actually, you cal already do that with one of the Nushell's testbins: |
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So, trying out the testbin: without this PR: with this PR: So yeah, seems like it's fixed even on Windows as well. I'd suggest changing the test to use the testbin and remove the OS guard. |
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@kubouch Thanks for testing these on Windows, and I just changed test code |
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thanks. let's move forward with this. |
* keep raw for variable inputed argument * fix clippy for windows * make test runs on windows
This PR is a complete rewrite of `run_external.rs`. The main goal of the rewrite is improving readability, but it also fixes some bugs related to argument handling and the PATH variable (fixes #6011). I'll discuss some technical details to make reviewing easier. ## Argument handling Quoting arguments for external commands is hard. Like, *really* hard. We've had more than a dozen issues and PRs dedicated to quoting arguments (see Appendix) but the current implementation is still buggy. Here's a demonstration of the buggy behavior: ```nu let foo = "'bar'" ^touch $foo # This creates a file named `bar`, but it should be `'bar'` ^touch ...[ "'bar'" ] # Same ``` I'll describe how this PR deals with argument handling. First, we'll introduce the concept of **bare strings**. Bare strings are **string literals** that are either **unquoted** or **quoted by backticks** [^1]. Strings within a list literal are NOT considered bare strings, even if they are unquoted or quoted by backticks. When a bare string is used as an argument to external process, we need to perform tilde-expansion, glob-expansion, and inner-quotes-removal, in that order. "Inner-quotes-removal" means transforming from `--option="value"` into `--option=value`. ## `.bat` files and CMD built-ins On Windows, `.bat` files and `.cmd` files are considered executable, but they need `CMD.exe` as the interpreter. The Rust standard library supports running `.bat` files directly and will spawn `CMD.exe` under the hood (see [documentation](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/index.html#windows-argument-splitting)). However, other extensions are not supported [^2]. Nushell also supports a selected number of CMD built-ins. The problem with CMD is that it uses a different set of quoting rules. Correctly quoting for CMD requires using [Command::raw_arg()](https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/os/windows/process/trait.CommandExt.html#tymethod.raw_arg) and manually quoting CMD special characters, on top of quoting from the Nushell side. ~~I decided that this is too complex and chose to reject special characters in CMD built-ins instead [^3]. Hopefully this will not affact real-world use cases.~~ I've implemented escaping that works reasonably well. ## `which-support` feature The `which` crate is now a hard dependency of `nu-command`, making the `which-support` feature essentially useless. The `which` crate is already a hard dependency of `nu-cli`, and we should consider removing the `which-support` feature entirely. ## Appendix Here's a list of quoting-related issues and PRs in rough chronological order. * #4609 * #4631 * #4601 * #5846 * #5978 * #6014 * #6154 * #6161 * #6399 * #6420 * #6426 * #6465 * #6559 * #6560 [^1]: The idea that backtick-quoted strings act like bare strings was introduced by Kubouch and briefly mentioned in [the language reference](https://www.nushell.sh/lang-guide/chapters/strings_and_text.html#backtick-quotes). [^2]: The documentation also said "running .bat scripts in this way may be removed in the future and so should not be relied upon", which is another reason to move away from this. But again, quoting for CMD is hard. [^3]: If anyone wants to try, the best resource I found on the topic is [this](https://daviddeley.com/autohotkey/parameters/parameters.htm).
Description
It's a further and user friendly improvement after #6420
Reiative issue: #6399
With this pr, users no longer need to quote variable as arguments which passed to external string.
Before:
After:
Tests
Make sure you've done the following:
Make sure you've run and fixed any issues with these commands:
cargo fmt --all -- --checkto check standard code formatting (cargo fmt --allapplies these changes)cargo clippy --workspace --features=extra -- -D warnings -D clippy::unwrap_used -A clippy::needless_collectto check that you're using the standard code stylecargo test --workspace --features=extrato check that all the tests pass