Perl Modul Nagios::Plugin and extra-opts - request for comments

Hi!

Holger Weiß asked me to introduce here what I intend to do.

I lately started to use Nagios::Plugin for a plugin I developed at work. 
I came across the --extra-opts parameter and thought that this could be 
very helpful.

Unfortunately I seem to found a bug - or at least - inconsistant behaviour.

When you pass on commandline something like --opt "test value" you get 
in your variable:
     test value

But if you put into the extra-opts file
     opt="test value"
you get
     "test value"

Okay, I could live with the plugin not removing the quotes, so I put 
into the extra-opts file
     opt=test vale
But guess what I got:
     "test value"

So N::P is introducing quotes here.

So my first idea is to get rid of those quotes.

Unfortunately this will break some of the tests, as they rely on the sub 
_cmdline which generates, from the internal options array, a commandline.

But this sub is, as far as I can see, only used for this test and 
nowhere else.

Additionally the quoting is done wrong or at least for an OS I don't 
know as quotes inside the string are not escaped. So this
     opt=a 2.5" hard disc
becomes
     "a 2.5" hard disc"

So the questions I have are:
1) For what reason was the quoting introduced - except for the tests?
2) For which platform is it intended? For sure no *IX
3) Is it required?

I'd vote for getting rid of the quoting.


My second idea is to introduce multiline values in the extra-opts file. 
This would simply be done in the usual way, by putting a backslash "\" 
as last charater of the line. All the lines will be concatenated by a 
single space after first triming them. So
     opt=multi \
         line \
         value
would become
     multi line value

Last but not lest I'd like to introduce a HERE-document like syntax in 
conformance to Config::General. Example:
     opt=<<HERE
         line 1
         line 2
         line 3
         HERE
would become
     line1\nline 2\nline 3\n

and, as the amount of whitespace before the end-marker is removed from 
all the lines:
     opt=<<HERE
         line 1
             line 2
         line 3
         HERE
would become
     line1\n    line2\nline 3\n

What do you think about my ideas?

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