[m-rev.] incomplete diff: allow quotes in mdb commands

Mark Brown dougl at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Thu Feb 21 23:37:34 AEDT 2002


This is in response to David Overton's bug report.  I've only written
the documentation so far, but I thought I'd invite comment on that
now before starting on the code.

Cheers,
Mark.

Estimated hours taken: 
Branches: main

Allow mdb commands to quote words so that they can contain whitespace,
and allow characters with special meaning to mdb to be escaped.

doc/user_guide.texi:
	Document the new feature.

	Also document the existing feature that allows multiple commands
	on one line, separated by semicolons.

Index: doc/user_guide.texi
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/mercury1/repository/mercury/doc/user_guide.texi,v
retrieving revision 1.284
diff -u -r1.284 user_guide.texi
--- doc/user_guide.texi	7 Jan 2002 07:48:10 -0000	1.284
+++ doc/user_guide.texi	21 Feb 2002 12:02:39 -0000
@@ -1800,10 +1800,21 @@
 
 When the debugger (as opposed to the program being debugged) is interacting
 with the user, the debugger prints a prompt and reads in a line of text,
-which it will interpret as its next command. Each command line consists
-of several words separated by white space. The first word is the name of
-the command, while any other words give options and/or parameters to the
-command.
+which it will interpret as its next command line.
+A command line consists of a single command,
+or several commands separated by semicolons.
+Each command consists of several words separated by white space.
+The first word is the name of the command,
+while any other words give options and/or parameters to the command.
+
+A word may itself contain semicolons or whitespace if it is
+enclosed in single quotes (').
+This is useful for commands that have other commands as parameters,
+for example @samp{view -w 'xterm -e'}.
+Characters that have special meaning to @samp{mdb} will be treated like
+ordinary charaters if they are escaped with a backslash (\).
+It is possible to escape single quotes, whitespace, semicolons, newlines
+and the escape character itself.
 
 Some commands take a number as their first parameter.
 For such commands, users can type `@var{number} @var{command}'
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