getcluster(1) should quote its shell output

[jdreed]

See #1036. While OTHER_REPOS=foo,bar ; export OTHER_REPOS ; works, we really should consider quoting.

[jdreed]

r25378

[jdreed]

TTL expired

[geofft]

It turns out this breaks printing, because the default dotfiles run awk against the output instead of sourcing it, and so you end up with PRINTER set to e.g. "meadow" instead of meadow.

I don't really object to adding quoting, but you need to make sure to update everything that uses it (and decide that nothing out-of-tree uses it without sourcing it).

[jdreed]

We probably do want this for a variety of reasons. I'll fix the dotfiles. Any cruft want to chime in about why the dotfiles use awk to begin with instead of sourcing? (For bonus points, please tell me it's to avoid any exploits from getcluster not quoting its shell output)

[andersk]

We could try to have getcluster quote its output only if it requires quoting, so as not to break backwards compatibility with stupid parsers.

[andersk]

And/or we could add an better interface (so we don’t have to think about filtering out dangerous variables like PATH). I propose this one:

$ getcluster -h w20-575-1 12.04 APT_RELEASE LPR
proposed
mitprint

$ { read APT_RELEASE; read LPR; } <<EOF
$(getcluster -h w20-575-1 12.04 APT_RELEASE LPR)
EOF

$ echo "APT_RELEASE=$APT_RELEASE LPR=$LPR"
APT_RELEASE=foo LPR=bar

[jdreed]

r25648 (10.1.0-0debathena1) adds a new option to print out space-separated key/value pairs to parse by hand, which is a quick fix for now. In the long term, I like the idea of quoting if the value contains anything other than alphanumeric characters and some whitelisted punctuation, but I also really like the idea of requesting a single value via an option. (getcluster -k APT_RELEASE -h w20-575-1 12.04). I'm going to use this ticket to track the status of the -p fix, and then re-milestone it until we flip out and rewrite getcluster in Python or something.

[jdreed]

OK, the short-term fix is in production. Someone should still flip out and do correct shell quoting.

[jdreed]

r25864 fixes the dotfiles.
r25865 fixes getcluster

[jdreed]

As Anders noted on zephyr, r25865 doesn't actually do much. We instead need to wrap it in single quotes, and replace single quotes in the value with '\'', and also strip (or throw an error) for newlines in tcsh. However, shellenv() also has a bunch of static buffers which should probably go away. At this point, I favor rewriting it in Python or something. Anyone disagree?

[jdreed]

Python rewrite with quoting functionality committed in r25869. We should not build this until debathena-dotfiles 10.0.32-0debathena1 is also built.

[jdreed]

dotfiles re-fixed in r25954.