shell quoting broken

[ezrizhu]

try bash -c "echo a"
actually executes
bash -c echo a

[mgree]

The solution is to appropriately quote when we generate $script_to_execute. A basic version of this would not be too hard, but subtleties of escaping abound.

Would be easily resolved in a rewrite not in the shell.

[mgree]

for arg in "$@"
do
    case $arg in
        (*[$(printf " \n\t()<>&;|\`?*\$\"'")\\]*)
          quoted=$(echo "$arg" | sed -e "s/'/'\\\\''/")
          printf "'%s' " "$quoted";;
        (*)   printf "%s " "$arg";;
    esac
done
printf "\n"

is a workable first cut.

[mgree]

Our tests expect that try "echo hi>foo" will preserve the redirect and that try "echo hi; echo bye" will preserve the pair of commands.

I don't see how we can support both this existing behavior and appropriate quoting of things like bash -c. An advantage of the current behavior is that you can run try "bash -c \"echo hi\"" and get the right behavior... whereas it's not clear how to preserve the shell syntax with this modified behavior.

Unless you have a better idea, I'll delete the branch and close the issue.

[ezrizhu]

I don't have a better idea, feel free to delete the branch. I'll close the issue once the docs has been updated.