On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Robert Shinka <k...@unknownlayer.net> wrote: > On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 04:18:18PM +0300, Philip Ganchev wrote: >> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 1:47 AM, Robert Shinka <k...@unknownlayer.net> wrote: >> > On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 09:20:21PM +0200, Jan Kanis wrote: >> >> >> Bash treats command substitution and variable expansion as a list of >> >> whitespace separated tokens. It also includes escapes to treat both as a >> >> single token, in case you don't want the default behaviour. >> >> >> >> Fish does the same for variables, except it doesn't split the contents >> >> when >> >> the variable is used, but it stores the tokens in a structured way as an >> >> array. Command substitution works a bit differently. Maintaining a >> >> structured >> >> form of data like with variables isn't possible because it is output from >> >> arbitrary commands, so fish splits the command output like bash does, >> >> but only >> >> on newlines. However fish doesn't provide a way to prevent the splitting. >> > >> > If fish reconstructed "$var" the same way it split it (with \n), then >> > your problem wouldn't exist. You could work with lines as usual with >> > $var, and "$var" would produce the exact data it was created with. >> > If anyone needed a space-separated version of the string for whatever >> > reason, they could trivially do so with echo or tr, but I think that's a >> > rare case. Right now, there's no reasonable utility. >> >> Yes, that would be more logical. But separating with spaces saves >> screen space when printing the array, which is quite a common >> operation. > > I'm only proposing changing the semantics of "$var", while $var would be > unchanged, so the common case of (echo $var) would format as usual, > separated with spaces, but (echo "$var") would print the original > string, including any embedded newlines. > > eg., >> set var (echo 1\n2\n3) >> echo $var # echo '1' '2' '3' > 1 2 3 >> echo "$var" # echo '1\n2\n3' > 1 > 2 > 3 > > Is there a compelling reason not to make this change?
Oh, I see. The only argument against that I can see is that it is an extra syntax rule to remember. This would solve Jan's use case by first setting a variable, as you show above. But maybe it would be logical if process substitution has a symmetric syntax: echo (echo 1\n2\n3) 1 2 3 echo "(echo 1\n2\n3)" 1 2 3 Regards, Philip ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 _______________________________________________ Fish-users mailing list Fish-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fish-users
