Re: [dev] announcing edit-pipe

From: Nick <suckless-dev_AT_njw.me.uk>
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2017 08:03:23 +0100

Quoth Greg Reagle:
> > * Quote "$edit" in case the editor has a space in its name.
>
> I deliberately do not quote $edit so that I can set EDITOR to nano -w.
> Is that non-standard/wacky? Is there a convention for whether the the
> value of EDITOR environment variable should be able to have options?

Any system that has an EDITOR which includes spaces isn't worth
supporting. Doubly so because you have a reasonable use-case that
makes quoting it the wrong thing to do. Bourne shell scripts will
always have to make certain trade-offs between portability and
readability. You could make the script massive and try (and fail) to
cover every eventuality, and it would get more and more horrible and
fail in more and more subtle ways. Supporting diverse stupid systems
is what made the GNU code as crazy as it is (arguably that helped it
gain dominance back when there were so many different and
incompatible unix systems, happily that's no longer the case today).
Received on Tue Aug 29 2017 - 09:03:23 CEST