Re: config.status - robust sed substitutions

[Andreas Buening]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> 
> Robert Anderson <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > However, note that _any_ new choice of delimiter will not only fail for
> > the case of the chosen character, but will also fail for the characters
> > '&' and '\' which are always metacharacters on the RHS of a sed
> > expression.
> 
> '\' we can't do much about here, though we can print an error message
> and exit.  It's pretty rare to find it in file names, outside of
> DOS-based systems, and those guys can always use '/' as it's
> equivalent.  And anyway '\' will break half the code in autoconf
> regardless, as it uses 'echo', so I'm not too worried about
> disallowing '\' in file names.

Last time I checked the '\' in filenames most of the autoconf code
worked with it (though it's not possible to succeed if your PATH
contains '\'). Nevertheless, I wouldn't like to get a *BOOM* from
the code just because there is a '\' in some program name.


> '&' we can defang by using '&' as the delimiter.  '&', like '|',
> rarely occurs in file names because it also is a shell metacharacter.
> So, how about if we use '&'?

And if one single quote is missing in configure.in the code makes
*BOOM* and nobody knows why. What about less dangerous characters?
I hope nobody uses '#' or ';' or '{' in filenames.


Bye,
Andreas