Re: How to choose the shell?

> From: Paul Smith <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
> Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2021 15:18:18 -0400
> 
> On Sun, 2021-09-05 at 22:08 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > First, how do you invoke the shell?  On Unix we do "$SHELL -c",
> > right?  What to do on Windows?  Most Windows shells don't support "-
> > c".
> > 
> > Next, what are the characters special to the shell, and how to escape
> > them?  We currently use Unix conventions for that, with some 
> > Windows fixups, but that won't necessarily work with an arbitrary
> > Windows shell.  What to use instead?
> 
> Sorry but I don't follow.  We don't invoke a shell at all: we invoke
> the command in the SHELL variable.

Yes, that's what I meant by $SHELL.

> We don't provide -c at all: we
> provide the options in the .SHELLFLAGS variable.

But there's a default if it is not provided, right?

> We don't escape anything at all: we provide the expansion of the
> command as the first argument.

I was alluding to the code described by this comment in job.c:

    /* SHELL may be a multi-word command.  Construct a command line
       "$(SHELL) $(.SHELLFLAGS) LINE", with all special chars in LINE escaped.
       Then recurse, expanding this command line to get the final
       argument list.  */

> In other words, GNU make should basically run the equivalent of this
> "pidgin code":
> 
>   argv = [$(SHELL)]
>   argv += $(split $(.SHELLFLAGS))
>   argv += ["<command>"]
>   exec(argv);

But that's not exactly what the code there does, according to my
reading of it.

> It's up to the user to make sure the above construct actually works, if
> they're not using a default SHELL.

Before it works, we need to make sure argv[] won't fail the 'exec'
call due to these minor details.

> This is why I raised the generalization of batch files as an issue:
> some commands may not be able to accept "<command>" on the command line
> like that, and if we could provide a _generic_ way to allow makefiles
> to change that final argv value to something else like a reference to a
> batch file where <command> was written, it could help.

Sure, but each shell has its own rules how to write batch files.  We
can support known shells, but what to do with unknown ones?