Re: [PATCH] fix bind -X quoting

[Chet Ramey]

On 7/19/23 12:47 PM, Grisha Levit wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 10:47 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:
> > Thanks for the report. It seems like your patch is incomplete, though.
> > After applying it:
> >
> > $ bind -x '"\eX": echo "x"'
> > $ bind -X
> > "\eX": "echo "x""
> >
> > We probably need to suppress printing the double quotes around `out' if
> > print_readably < 0.
>
> Oh good point.  I guess we'd need to also print a backslash if the
> first character of the command is a quote.

Quoted command lines are tricky. Like a regular readline key binding, a
command name that starts with a double quote is assumed to be a single
double-quoted string (like any other macro), where the double quotes get
stripped before calling rl_generic_bind. Practically, this means that you
can -- and have historically been able to -- run

bind -x '"\eX": "echo x y z"'

and have `echo x y z' executed when you type M-X.

Not only does this not permit quoted command names with arguments, you have
to detect the difference between a quoted string and a quoted command name
after all that  information has been lost. Changing this means backwards-
incompatible changes to bind_keyseq_to_unix_command.

You could do it if you allowed, say

bind -x '"\eX": \"command with spaces\" \"x\"'

and then stripped the backslashes before calling rl_generic_bind, but
that's not exactly backwards compatible either.

And since the bash code parses the command like you passed it to `eval',
you can't have readline quoting double-quotes in the command string with
backslashes.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/