On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 7:51 PM 積丹尼 Dan Jacobson <jida...@jidanni.org> wrote: > > OK. > But I now "demand" that xargs add a --show-quoting or whatever argument,
Your demand must be presented in the form of a patch. > so that --verbose, and -p, will now show > 'xdotool' 'mousemove' '0 0' 'click' '1' 'mousemove' 'restore' ?... > vs. > 'xdotool' 'mousemove' '0' '0' 'click' '1' 'mousemove' 'restore' ?... > for people who care about those details, > else there is *no way*, using the xargs command itself, for the user to > know what is about to come flying in his face. > > You can't just offer no way to distinguish the two cases, even if saying > something in the fine print of the man page. It's not fair. > > "sh -x" already does this. sh has a clear way to determine the precise semantics of the necessary quoting style. That is, it knows precisely what constructs contain metacharacters or field separators that need quoting.
