Re: array with newlines preserved as literal text

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 2021-02-02 12:25 p.m., Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 11:16 AM Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:
>>
>> I'm curious why you want to save this in the form of a command to be
>> eval'd rather than just save the argument string?
Complicated.  It goes back to my first bitch with zsh, namely not being 
able to capture the literal invocation of a function (along with it's 
tail) unexpanded, just as you'd see in history.  (History would work 
fine except for the fact that several commands can end up on the same 
line.)  Basically my wrappers do some heavy duty massaging of output and 
both for debugging and or for modification it's good to be able to 
recall the actual commands executed.  My function '_execute' does that, 
it calls 'eval' but does other stuff too like store to history.  Here's 
a sample:

$  l ,Hs c,*   # 'l' wraps 'ls' and colorizes and formats the output as 
I like:

LISTING of "c,*": all file types, INsensitive. Sorting upside down by: 
File Size:

  10746 [2020-12-20--14:48] c,34
  11168 [2020-12-27--10:39] c,35,localized help
  11219 [2020-12-27--10:45] c,36
  11348 [2020-12-28--13:30] c,38,delete deleted directories
  11428 [2020-12-28--10:46] c,37,trivial
  11665 [2020-12-28--16:17] c,39
  11833 [2020-12-28--16:48] c,40,misc
  13253 [2020-12-28--19:48] c,41,polishing
  13376 [2020-12-28--20:09] c,42,messages improved
  13383 [2020-12-29--07:02] c,43,before improved cd
  14045 [2021-01-31--11:08] c,55,more one line bugs
  14053 [2021-01-31--13:05] c,56,trivial edits
  14156 [2021-01-30--10:48] c,54,rationalize switches
  14184 [2021-01-24--20:47] c,52,interim
  14186 [2021-01-29--06:17] c,53,more sky trouble. big code purge
  14494 [2020-12-30--06:17] c,44,better cd to incomplete name
  14925 [2020-12-30--11:55] c,47,massive edit old code purged
  15493 [2020-12-30--09:41] c,45,working huge edit
  15741 [2021-01-31--10:48] c,48,good old Sky above was truncated
  16080 [2020-12-30--10:06] c,46,bad
  16394 [2021-01-07--08:49] c,50

Items found: 1
Total bytes in this directory: 2.9M
Total including subdirs: 15M

... the ',H' switch stores the actual working code to history.  Hit the 
up arrow and:

$ ls -AFrGgdS  --time-style='+[%F--%H:%M]' --group-directories-first   
--color=always  (#i)c,* 2> /dev/null   | sed -r "s|^(.{10} [[:digit:]] 
)| |"  | egrep -v '^total' | egrep -i --color=always "^|] c,*" | sed -r 
"s/\x1b\[01;31m\x1b\[K\] /\] \x1b\[01;31m\x1b\[K/g"

... hit ENTER and exactly the same output occurs.  Or modify to suit, or 
perhaps to chase down a bug.
But it requires execution to be put off, thus the need for an eval 
contained within '_execute'.   Meanwhile let's see what Roman has for me.