← Back to context

Comment by hello_computer

7 days ago

There are so many neo-shells that go crazy with colors, autocompletions, & SQL-like features while the most basic problems (like handling of newlines/spaces/international chars) are mostly swept under the rug with -null/-print0, which is more hack than solution. I think Tom Duff's rc shell was an excellent start in that direction, which sadly went nowhere.

4 comments

hello_computer

Reply
chubot  6 days ago

YSH addresses the "string safety" problem:

What is YSH? https://oils.pub/ysh.html

I am writing a quoting module now, but the key point is that it's a powerful enough language to do so. It is more like Python or JS; you don't have to resort to sed to parse and quote strings.

I posted the quote-argv solution above -- in YSH it will likely be:

    var argv = :| ls 'arg with space' |   # like bash argv=()
    ssh example.com $[quote.sh(argv)]

But you can write such a function NOW if you like

---

quote.sh follows the (subtle) idiom of replacing a single quote ' with

    '\''

which means it works on systems with remote POSIX sh, not just YSH !

e.g. "isn't" in POSIX shell is quoted as

    'isn'\''t'

which is these three word parts:

    'isn' \' 't'

YSH also has:

- JSON, which can correctly round trip every Unicode string, without writing your own parsing functions

- JSON8, an optional extension that can round trip every byte string you get from the Unix kernel

https://oils.pub/release/latest/doc/j8-notation.html

o11c  6 days ago

To be fair, most of those "basic problems" have basic solutions as long as you're not trying to avoid GNU tools.

The nastiest case is probably `globasciiranges`.