Nala Ginrut <nalagin...@gmail.com> writes today about adding a function to return a string from a command executed by a shell, because (system "...") only returns the exit status of the last command.
The one point that I think is important is the handling of whitespace. The Unix shells in their backquoted `cmd` and $(cmd) syntax normalize the output of cmd to replace runs of whitespace [ \n\r\v\t]+ by single spaces. For shell use, that is convenient. However, inside guile, it may be more useful to preserve the whitespace as is, and particularly the line breaks. A user who wants whitespace collapsed to single spaces can easily do so with a regexp substitution, and that could be facilitated by providing a standard guile library function to do the job consistently. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 be...@acm.org be...@computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
