Re: Quoting, backslashes, CLI and MI

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:01:37 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> Cc: gdb@sourceware.org
> 
> Actually, there's two different possibilities here, and I think I
> focused on the wrong one.
> 
> 1.  We want -exec-arguments to take MI-quoted individual arguments,
>     which are then passed as argv elements to the program.
> 
> 2.  We want -exec-arguments to take a single MI-quoted argument,
>     which is the value to set the argument string to, for the target
>     and/or shell to handle however they deem appropriate.

I think we should take (2).  We shouldn't second-guess or reinvent
shell features.  There's a good chance that the string is actually
coming from a user who typed it, in which case it will be in the form
we type at the shell's prompt.  So it should go to the shell for
interpretation.

> Then there's the question of what to do with CLI "set args".  People
> use this today and it is passed literally to the program, without any
> interpretation of quotes or escapes - if you want that to happen you
> wait for the shell to do it.  I don't think that we can really change
> that - we can bump the interface version on MI, but we can't really
> bump it on our CLI users' fingers :-)
> 
> So CLI "set args" will need to continue being unescaped, one way or
> another.

Yes, and I Think this is The Right Thing to do, for the same reasons.