On 10/31/25 8:49 PM, Sean McAfee wrote:
I wrote a short Raku script that connects to my VPN provider using a
command piactl. In my first version I used an approach similar to one
I've used many times before, calling out to a shell and being very
careful about shell escaping issues:
run 'bash', '-c', 'piactl disconnect && piactl set region "$1" && piactl
connect', '--', $region;
I happened to browse the Raku docs about quoting constructs, and
something finally clicked about quote protection within « » quotes. It
works like a shell!
run «bash -c 'piactl disconnect && piactl set region "$1" && piactl
connect' -- "$region"»;
It's just as safe as the first version, but a bit more readable.
At this point I realized that I really didn't need the shell after all.
run in sink context raises an error, so I could just as well do that at
every step as for the overall chain of calls:
run <piactl disconnect>;
run «piactl set region "$region"»;
run <piactl connect>;
And the quote protection I was so happy to have figured out is slightly
less readable than the plain vanilla alternative:
run <piactl set region>, $region;
I'm glad it's there in case I need it in the future, though. I'd use it
if there were additional arguments, eg:
run «piactl set region "$region" --force»;
Hi Sean,
Whenever I see a problem with test and quotes, I use
Q[...]
And the concatenate it to the string.
For example:
my Str $x = [<meta content="The Raku® programming language."
name="description" />];
print $x ~ "\n";
HTH,
-T
