[Edbrowse-dev] we shouldn't be letting glob() do our tilde expansion

[Edbrowse-dev] we shouldn't be letting glob() do our tilde expansion

[chris]

Two reasons, one can probably be surmounted, the other probably cannot.

1. musl, the libc implementation that I use for building the static
executables, lacks GLOB_TILDE_CHECK (and GLOB_TILDE for that matter).
I don't think they're in POSIX.
2. The insurmountable one is that it creates a big inconsistency in the
behavior of commands with respect to filename expansion.  Look at the
following typescript to see why.

Script started on Thu 14 May 2015 08:31:42 AM PDT
[chris@mushroom ~]$ edbrowse
do not send referrer
edbrowse ready
$a
hello
.
w ~/foo
cannot create ~/foo
w /home/chris/foo
6
1c
goodbye
.
w ~/foo
8
q
[chris@mushroom ~]$ exit
exit

Script done on Thu 14 May 2015 08:32:26 AM PDT

I'd be happy to submit a patch for review to rework envFile, so that it
does its own ~ and ~username expansion.

Sorry I didn't catch this earlier.

-- Chris

[Edbrowse-dev] we shouldn't be letting glob() do our tilde expansion

[Karl Dahlke]

> lacks GLOB_TILDE_CHECK (and GLOB_TILDE for that matter).

Yeah that's a concern.

> The insurmountable one is that it creates a big inconsistency

Well it's sort of an inconsistency and sort of not.
If you expand foo*bar and there is no match it remains foo*bar.
If you expand ~/foo and there is no match it remains ~/foo.
That is consistent, and how glob works, but it might
not be how you want it to work.
In your defense, the shell expands as you want edbrowse to,
expanding ~ first and then doing the glob.

We can roll our own ~ expansion,
It wouldn't be hard.
I suppose using the getpwent routines and looking for login match
and pasting in the home directory, I think that's what glob does for us,
and I really didn't want to have to do it myself, but whatever.

Let me think about this one for a bit while I finish the code compression project,
which is coming along nicely.

Karl Dahlke

[Edbrowse-dev] we shouldn't be letting glob() do our tilde expansion

[Karl Dahlke]

Ok, ~user is now under my control, and it behaves like the shell.
It always expands if possible, even if follow-on globbing doesn't match.
This is the same as environment variables; they expand.
This change was easy, about 30 lines of code, with getpwnam doing most of the work.

Karl Dahlke

Re: [Edbrowse-dev] we shouldn't be letting glob() do our tilde expansion

[chris]

Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net> writes:

> Ok, ~user is now under my control, and it behaves like the shell.
> It always expands if possible, even if follow-on globbing doesn't match.

Thank you.
With that, the new static binaries are up.

-- Chris