Re: Quoting, backslashes, CLI and MI

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:33:24 -0500
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> 
> I think that we want to continue using buildargv-style quoting for CLI
> commands, and that it would be desirable to use only MI-style
> quoting for MI commands.

I agree.  But that means MI commands that delegate to CLI will have to
process the arguments to modify the quoting, right?

> So I think that we should take this opportunity to fix up all MI
> commands to quote like the documentation says they do.

It would be good to fix that now, yes.

However, I Think we need 2 different styles of quoting: one for file
names, the other for strings.  Otherwise, supporting the Windows
backslashes will be hard.  Also, there are messy cases such as this:

    (gdb) break "foo bar.c":'MyClass::MyMethod'

(I'm not even sure I quoted it correctly ;-).  Can we really use the
same quoting rules for both the file-name and class/method name in
such situations?

> I'd like to fix up all the CLI and "set" commands to use buildargv style
> quoting, too.

If you agree with me on the two quoting styles, you will also agree
that we need two different flavors of buildargv.

> Andrew Cagney pointed out in a PR that we might need to update the
> readline filename completion, too.  I'm not sure if that's still relevant,
> it needs a third look.

It's relevant, at least wrt backslashes in Windows file names: if you
type TAB with backslash being the last character, completion won't
work (it does TRT when there are backslashes further to the left of
the cursor, though).  Also, quoted file names, with or without
whitespace, aren't completed correctly, no matter if they use forward
or backslashes.