Re: protect spaces and/or globs

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 2021-02-10 8:29 a.m., Peter Stephenson wrote:
>
> As always, that depends what you're actually doing, which is a superset of
> what you're telling us you're doing,
It's hard to put it briefly and still accurately.  I went down a certain 
path when I first
got involved and it might not have been the right path nevertheless it 
has a certain
power.  My wrappers evolve and evolve with more and more filtering and 
coloring
and columnizing and massaging and end up with some monstrous actual command
strings to execute.  By being able to recall the actual command, I can 
edit it to find
some bug very quickly.  My function assembled: " grep-i -- arg arg " 
when what was
wanted was: " grep -i -- arg arg " . Once I know where the bug is, I can 
figure out
where it came from in my function very quickly.   So I assemble my 
string, save it
to history (optionally) and then eval it to fire it off.  Up arrow, and 
voila!  I have the
guts of what my function did, available to tweak.  So:

9 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 3 $ l ,H l,*

LISTING of "l,*": all file types, INsensitive. Sorting upside down by: 
Mod. Time:

  11434 [2021-01-07--08:49] l,6,NO H
  10516 [2021-01-07--08:49] l,4,BUG and case now insensitive
...
  15988 [2021-02-03--20:06] l,51,colorize all matches if leading wildcard
  15614 [2021-02-04--16:34] l,52,bug with totals

Items found: 52
Total bytes in this directory: 3.5M
Total including subdirs: 16M

... and how did that actually happen?  " ,H " orders a write to history 
so up arrow and:

9 /aWorking/Zsh/Source/Wk 3 $ ls -AFrGgdt --time-style='+[%F--%H:%M]' 
--group-directories-first --color=always  (#i)l,* 2> /dev/null   | sed 
-r "s|^(.{10} {1,2}[[:digit:]]{1,2} )| |"  | egrep -v '^total' | egrep 
-i --color=always "^|] l,*"                      | sed -r 
"s/\x1b\[01;31m\x1b\[K\] /\] \x1b\[01;31m\x1b\[K/g"

... that's the actual guts of the thing.  No, I'm not insane, I just 
like color, prefer to remove all the permissions stuff since it it 
irrelevant to me, etc.  But the whole show requires the whole command to 
exist as a string so it can be saved and thus it needs 'eval' to fire it 
off ... unless I'm mistaken.

If that makes any sense.  It all works quite fine but there are these 
quoting issues now and then.