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

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Nala Ginrut <address@hidden> 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.  

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.

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