Caveats of setopt magic_equal_subst

Caveats of setopt magic_equal_subst

[Benjamin R. Haskell]

As with so many things Zsh-related, I just discovered that something I'd 
kind of wanted for a while was a built-in option: magic_equal_subst

I was just wondering if there were commonly-occurring situations where 
magic_equal_subst might bite me.  It seems like the benefits will 
outweigh having to workaround such situations, but I was just hoping to 
get a group opinion or warning if I'm being optimistic.

My main reason for switching it on is that I use a lot of named 
directories, and I'd like to be able to use them where command options 
are of the form --some-option=~some/filename

-- 
Best,
Ben

Re: Caveats of setopt magic_equal_subst

[Peter Stephenson]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2010 15:49:49 -0400 (EDT)
"Benjamin R. Haskell" <zsh@benizi.com> wrote:
> As with so many things Zsh-related, I just discovered that something I'd 
> kind of wanted for a while was a built-in option: magic_equal_subst
> 
> I was just wondering if there were commonly-occurring situations where 
> magic_equal_subst might bite me.  It seems like the benefits will 
> outweigh having to workaround such situations, but I was just hoping to 
> get a group opinion or warning if I'm being optimistic.
> 
> My main reason for switching it on is that I use a lot of named 
> directories, and I'd like to be able to use them where command options 
> are of the form --some-option=~some/filename

I've been using it for quite some time and I'm not aware of any
problems.  Command line syntax is usually such that an "=" does
something approximately like what you expect it to.

The only slight oddity I know is that it does "=" substitution as well
as "~" substitution:

% echo animal==cat
animal=/bin/cat

but none of the places I know about where "==" is significant occur in
arguments like that.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>
Web page now at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/p.w.stephenson/