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Comment by panzi

7 days ago

I understand that it is convenient for running small snippets like that, but I don't really think it's worth the risk. And putting it into a config file is different, IMO. You don't get tempted to do some bad string interpolation there, because you can't, unless the config file format has support for that, but then I criticize that. If you need to pass things to such a snipped do it via environment variables or standard IO, not string interpolation.

If you say you don't make such mistakes: Yeah, but people do. People that write the code that runs on your system.

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panzi

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theamk  6 days ago

But if you want a command-line option for hook, what are the alternatives?

Force user to always create a wrapper script? that's just extra annoyance and if user is bad at quoting, they'll have the same problems with a script

Disable hooks at all? that's bad functionality regression

Ask for multiple arguments? this makes command-line parsing much more awkward.. I have not seen any good solutions for that.

(The only exception is writing a command wrapper that takes exactly 1 user command, like "timeout" or "xargs".. but those already using argument vector instead of parsing)

  • frumplestlatz  6 days ago

    You define a config file format that supports only the minimal syntax required to specify a multi-argument command (e.g. spaces separate arguments, arguments with spaces in them may be quoted or use backslashes to escape them).

    Then, you parse that out into a proper argument array and pass it to exec*/posix_spawn.