idallen@watmath.UUCP (07/23/84)
The C Shell is designed to do the first "word" of the input as a
separate entity from the rest of the arguments, so if you type
`command` arg1 arg2 arg3
you can be sure that `command` will expand to at most one word and
your supplied arguments will still be numbers 1, 2 and 3 to that
command. It isn't hard to rewrite that a part of the shell to remove
this restriction, but you have to decide if you really want to change it.
As pointed out, giving the command to the EVAL built-in will remove
the restriction for you, but you have to be careful of the other CSH
bug where redirection of I/O and pipes are ignored for the first
command inside the EVAL, e.g.:
eval "who|sort" # the sort is ignored; WHO appears on tty
eval "who" |sort # this works
eval "date >x" # the ">x" is ignored; DATE appears on tty
eval "date" >x # this works
eval "date|who|sort"# the pipe between date|who is ignored; who|sort works
eval "date|who >x" # the pipe between date|who is ignored; who >x works
eval "date|users >x;echo hi" >y
# DATE goes to Y, USERS to X, and HI to the tty (!)
This is because the EVAL built-in doesn't preserve and redo its file
descriptors for the commands it's about to execute. I have a fix; but,
it's in with my other 20 pages of C Shell bug descriptions. You'll
know you got the fix right if this works:
echo "eval 'who|sort' | grep tty" | eval `cat` >xxx
--
-IAN! (Ian! D. Allen) University of Waterloo