avoiding escaping chars in exec commands

From: Tennis Smith (tennis_smith_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/31/03

  • Next message: bitCrypT: "entry widgets and tabbing" 
    Date: 30 Oct 2003 17:47:17 -0800

    Hi,

    I sometimes have to do relatively complex interactions with other
    tools inside tcl. They are accessed using "exec".

    But, often the tools being used have chars in the invocation which are
    special to tcl. So far, I simply escape the chars with a "\".

    That works, but causes some pretty ugly source code. For example, if
    I want to do something like this from tcl:

    awk '/cmd=/ { printf("%s %s %s %s", $1,$2,$8,$7); for (i = 14; i < NF;
    i++) printf( " %s",$i); print "" }' aaa_raw > blit

    I have to make it look like this in the source file code fragment:

    if [catch {exec /usr/bin/sh -c \
                   "awk '/cmd=/ \
                   { printf(\"%s %s %s %s\", \$1,\$2,\$8,\$7); \
                     for (i = 14; i < NF; i++) printf( \" %s\",\$i); \
                     print \"\" \
                   }' $raw_file > $raw2_file" \
               } err] {
        puts stderr "CapAAA-003: $err"
        exit 0
    }

    Is there any way to avoid using the "\" char everywhere and passing
    the whole thing at once?

    TIA,
    -Tennis

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