86 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
86 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
|
|
||
|
This code is a utility function I was considering adding to Mingw32. The
|
||
|
Microsoft versions of argc, argv construction use quotes and backslashes
|
||
|
to allow the user to pass arguments containing spaces (or quotes) to
|
||
|
programs they invoke. The rules are
|
||
|
|
||
|
- Arguments containing spaces must be enclosed in quotes.
|
||
|
- A quote can be passed by preceeding it with a backslash.
|
||
|
- Backslashes immediately preceeding a quote must be doubled to avoid
|
||
|
escaping the quote.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Thus an argument like:
|
||
|
|
||
|
-D="Foo Bar\\"
|
||
|
|
||
|
needs to be mangled as:
|
||
|
|
||
|
"-D\"Foo Bar\\\\\""
|
||
|
|
||
|
in order to get to the program as what was intended above.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The fix_argv set of functions is meant to be used with spawnv and the
|
||
|
like to allow a program to set up an argv array for the spawned program
|
||
|
and have that array duplicated *exactly* in the spawned program, no
|
||
|
matter what it contains (it also quotes 'globbing' characters like *
|
||
|
and ?, so it does not matter if the destination has globbing turned on
|
||
|
or not; it might be a reasonable extension to allow a flag to allow
|
||
|
globbing characters to pass through unmolested, but they would still
|
||
|
be quoted if the string contained whitespace).
|
||
|
|
||
|
The reason for writing this came up because of problems with arguments
|
||
|
like -DBLAH="Foo Bar" to GCC (define BLAH as a preprocessor constant
|
||
|
being the string "Foo Bar", including the quotes). Because GCC simply
|
||
|
passes the argument directly to CPP (the preprocessor) it had to be
|
||
|
escaped *twice*:
|
||
|
|
||
|
"-DBLAH=\"\\\"Foo Bar\\\"\""
|
||
|
|
||
|
This would reach GCC as
|
||
|
|
||
|
-DBLAH="\"Foo Bar\""
|
||
|
|
||
|
And that would reach CPP as the desired
|
||
|
|
||
|
-DBLAH="Foo Bar"
|
||
|
|
||
|
One level of quoting and escaping is to be expected (although MS's
|
||
|
standard is, arguably, not very good), but forcing the user to know
|
||
|
how many different programs the argument is going to pass through,
|
||
|
and perform double quoting and escaping, seems unreasonable. If
|
||
|
GCC and friends all used fix_argv (they use their own version of
|
||
|
it now) then the original argument could be
|
||
|
|
||
|
"-DBLAH=\"Foo Bar\""
|
||
|
|
||
|
And that would work fine, no matter how many different tools it
|
||
|
passed through.
|
||
|
|
||
|
The only basic limitation with this code is that it assumes that all
|
||
|
the spawned programs use Microsoft-type escaping when interpreting
|
||
|
their command line. Most programs on Win32 machines do (anything
|
||
|
compiled with Mingw32 will).
|
||
|
|
||
|
For now, this code has been relegated to 'sample' status. If you want
|
||
|
to use it, feel free (it is public domain after all).
|
||
|
|
||
|
Colin.
|
||
|
|
||
|
P.S. Just out of interest you might try writing your own little program
|
||
|
to look at the interaction of wildcards and quotes. Use the glob.exe
|
||
|
program in ../globbing and see what it does with
|
||
|
|
||
|
glob "foo*.txt"
|
||
|
|
||
|
even if there are files foo.txt and foobar.txt in the same directory.
|
||
|
|
||
|
Note that
|
||
|
|
||
|
del "My *.txt"
|
||
|
|
||
|
works (i.e. it deletes all files starting with My<space>). This could
|
||
|
not be done unless del does globbing *after* processing escapes and
|
||
|
quotes, which is not the way it seems to work normally (again see
|
||
|
the glob example).
|
||
|
|