On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:33 PM, Greg Wooledge <wool...@eeg.ccf.org> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:25:00PM +1000, Jon Seymour wrote: >> I am working on an extension to git, and need to store a list of shell >> files that can be used to extend the capabilities of the command I am >> writing. Most of the time, a variable of the form: >> >> GIT_EXTRA_CONDITION_LIBS="libA.sh libB.sh" would work, but technically >> speaking, I do need to support spaces in the path (if nothing else, >> git's test suite cunningly runs within a directory that contains space >> in the name :-). > > If this is an environment variable, then you're screwed. Environment > variables can't be arrays, and if they could, they surely wouldn't be > portable. > >> In the end, what I have done is make use of git's rev-parse --sq-quote >> feature to quote filenames that can contain spaces. That way, if you >> really want spaces in the filenames, you can have it, but if you >> don't, then you get the convenience of space as a separator. >>
>> So, for example: >> >> GIT_EXTRA_CONDITION_LIBS="libA.sh 'lib B.sh' libC.sh" > > What does it do with filenames that contain apostrophes? How do you > read the filenames back out of this format? The only ways I can > think of off the top of my head to parse that kind of input in a > script are eval and xargs, and those should send you screaming.... > > There really is no good way to put multiple filenames into a single > environment variable. Your best bet is to put them in a file and > make the environment variable point to that file. The contents of > the file would have to be NUL-delimited or newline-delimited. I'm > pretty sure that you'll end up going with newline delimiters and just > saying "if your filenames have newlines in them, you lose, so don't > do that". Which is not the worst approach in the world. > All good points. I think I'll change tack slighty. git has a configuration mechanism that can server to store lists that users might want to configure and I can add an --include option where required to allow wrapper commands to add their own libraries, as required, thus eliminating the requirement to inherit such lists from the environment. Thanks again. jon.
