Re: [screen-devel] PATCH: new 'if' primitive

[Steve Kemp]

On Tue Oct 21, 2008 at 13:18:41 -0700, Micah Cowan wrote:

> There's plenty of time to discuss it, given that it definitely wouldn't
> be added for 4.1.0. If Lua support is mature by then, then the obvious
> solution would be to just use that, instead of inventing something new.

  That sounds reasonable.   Optimistically I was hoping for a new
 branch, or similar, which could try out some of these changes.
 As things stand I guess I'm going to have to keep maintaining my
 own set of changes which is not ideal, but something I can live
 with.

  You're definitely right that with lua support a lot of the things
 I've been doing would be better implemented in it.  But I'm assuming
 that like any changes I've suggested any lua integration into
 mainline Screen is going to be in the future.

> Other than that, I'd say that in general it'd be good to emulate shell
> semantics, both for test-like comparisons and for subshells. Not
> necessarily full-featured support, but those features we choose to
> supply should probably mimic Bourne/POSIX syntax.

  I think that I've managed to do that now:

    if -x file/path ..
    if -d file/path ..
    if -e file/path ..

    if $FOO -eq "bar" ..
    if `hostname` -eq steve ..
    if `"hostname --fqdn"` -ne "bar" ..
    if "test one" -eq "test two" "echo 'cats and dogs living together'"

Steve
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