passing positional arguments to esyscmd

[Sergey Astanin]

Hello, everybody,

I cannot figure out how to pass positional arguments of a macro to
esyscmd. I tried googling but found no examples beyond simple calls like
esyscmd(`date'). In my case the shell command depends on positional
arguments: I want to write macro like _MY_MACRO(var1,var2) that expands to
``var1 : some-text-generated-using-var2'', where
``some-text-generated-using-var2'' is an output of my perl script
``./script.pl var2''.

The first thing I tried was:
m4_define(`_MY_MACRO', `$1 : 'm4_esyscmd(`./script.pl '$2))

It does not work, and the scipt diagnostics shows that it was called
without any argument. I also tried m4_esyscmd(`./script.pl $2'),
m4_esyscmd(./script.pl $2), but none of them worked.

Though, if I write something like
m4_define(`_MY_MACRO', `$1 : '(`./script.pl '$2))
the shell command is displayed correctly: ``./script.pl var2''.

So, I suppose, esyscmd expands its arguments in a different way, than that
of a normal macros, or probably, the positional parameters are treated
differently. The question is how I may call esyscmd and have all its
arguments expanded.

I would appreciate any clue or advise, or a workaround.

Sincerely yours,
Sergey Astanin.