GNU bug report logs - #54603
29.0.50; [PATCH] Eshell's external pipe module interferes with other argument parsing hooks

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From: Jim Porter <jporterbugs <at> gmail.com>
To: 54603 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#54603: 29.0.50; [PATCH] Eshell's external pipe module interferes with other argument parsing hooks
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2022 19:21:17 -0700

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

From "emacs -Q --eval '(eshell)':

  ~ $ (eq 'foo nil)
  Expecting completion of delimiter ' ...

  M-: (unload-feature 'em-extpipe)

  ~ $ (eq 'foo nil)
  ;; No output, since it returns nil. This is correct.

(As an ironic twist, you'd normally be able to run "(unload-feature 
'em-extpipe)" as a command in Eshell, but this bug prevents that from 
working.)

I don't fully understand all the details of the code in 
lisp/eshell/em-extpipe.el yet, but I think this is the culprit:

                         (while (or (eshell-parse-lisp-argument)
                                    (eshell-parse-backslash)
                                    (eshell-parse-double-quote)
                                    (eshell-parse-literal-quote)))

In particular, since there are 3 single-quotes, 
`eshell-parse-literal-quote' throws an `eshell-incomplete' error, which 
gums up the works.

The attached patch resolves the issue for me, but I'm not sure if it's 
the best strategy. If possible, I think it would be better for 
`eshell-parse-external-pipeline' to solely focus on finding the external 
pipe operators ("*|", "*<", and "*>")[1] and then for 
`eshell-rewrite-external-pipeline' to prepare the command string to pass 
to sh. This would also have the advantage[2] of making it possible to 
support a richer set of Eshell features with external pipes, such as the 
following:

  ~ $ echo $(message "[%s]" "hi") *| cat
  zsh:1: command not found: message

(If you remove the "*", this outputs "[hi]", and it should be 
technically possible to make this work with external pipes too, provided 
it executes the Lisp code before generating the command string for sh.)

[1] See `eshell-parse-delimiter' for an example of how that might be 
implemented.
[2] Well, maybe there's room for debate on what the right behavior here is.

[0001-Make-Eshell-s-extpipe-more-lenient-when-looking-for-.patch (text/plain, attachment)]

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