[Nagiosplug-devel] Perl Modul Nagios::Plugin and extra-opts - request for comments

[William Leibzon]

Yes, get rid of quotes. But please introduce either one multi-line syntax
or the other (and I prefer just \ at the end of line) and document that
use. I'll soon have to write my own implementation compatible with
--extra-opts and I don't want to have to support 3 different ways either.

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Stephan <Stephan at quantentunnel.de> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Holger Weiß asked me to introduce here what I intend to do.
>
> I lately started to use Nagios::Plugin for a plugin I developed at work.
> I came across the --extra-opts parameter and thought that this could be
> very helpful.
>
> Unfortunately I seem to found a bug - or at least - inconsistant behaviour.
>
> When you pass on commandline something like --opt "test value" you get
> in your variable:
>     test value
>
> But if you put into the extra-opts file
>     opt="test value"
> you get
>     "test value"
>
> Okay, I could live with the plugin not removing the quotes, so I put
> into the extra-opts file
>     opt=test vale
> But guess what I got:
>     "test value"
>
> So N::P is introducing quotes here.
>
> So my first idea is to get rid of those quotes.
>
> Unfortunately this will break some of the tests, as they rely on the sub
> _cmdline which generates, from the internal options array, a commandline.
>
> But this sub is, as far as I can see, only used for this test and
> nowhere else.
>
> Additionally the quoting is done wrong or at least for an OS I don't
> know as quotes inside the string are not escaped. So this
>     opt=a 2.5" hard disc
> becomes
>     "a 2.5" hard disc"
>
> So the questions I have are:
> 1) For what reason was the quoting introduced - except for the tests?
> 2) For which platform is it intended? For sure no *IX
> 3) Is it required?
>
> I'd vote for getting rid of the quoting.
>
>
> My second idea is to introduce multiline values in the extra-opts file.
> This would simply be done in the usual way, by putting a backslash "\"
> as last charater of the line. All the lines will be concatenated by a
> single space after first triming them. So
>     opt=multi \
>         line \
>         value
> would become
>     multi line value
>
> Last but not lest I'd like to introduce a HERE-document like syntax in
> conformance to Config::General. Example:
>     opt=<<HERE
>         line 1
>         line 2
>         line 3
>         HERE
> would become
>     line1\nline 2\nline 3\n
>
> and, as the amount of whitespace before the end-marker is removed from
> all the lines:
>     opt=<<HERE
>         line 1
>             line 2
>         line 3
>         HERE
> would become
>     line1\n    line2\nline 3\n
>
> What do you think about my ideas?
>
>
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