Subject: PipeRead

From: "Greg J. Badros" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 16:29:46 -0400 (EDT)

Hi,
  Two requests that I'd love to see, but don't have time right now to do
(and couldn't do as well as someone more familiar with FVWM than I am).

* A mechanism to print out an arbitrary message to stderr... this could
  be used to aid in debugging in order to see where FVWM gets upset in 
  its initialization files.  Something like:

Trace "Parsing menu definitions..."

  Would just write the message to stderr.  Currently I hack this by
something like:

Parsing_menu_definitions...

  And fvwm gives me an error message about not being able to find that
module.  The underscores are so I get the whole message in the error file.

* PipeRead is a great addition, but I'd love to see it work better with
FvwmM4.  Specifically, I used to do something like this:

define(`m4_hosts_list_file',maketemp(`TMPDIR/xhostsXXXXXX'))
syscmd(`awk </etc/hosts "/localhost/ {next}\
/^[^#]*[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+/ {print \"AddHostToMenu(\"\$2\
\",Hosts)\" }" > 'm4_hosts_list_file)
include(m4_hosts_list_file)
syscmd(rm m4_hosts_list_file)'

To simulate something like PipeRead.  Though I can certainly create a
macro to do this more cleanly, it'd be nice if:

PipeRead awk </etc/hosts "/localhost/ {next}\
/^[^#]*[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+/ {print \"AddHostToMenu(\"\$2\
\",Hosts)\" }"

Would work. Currently, I don't think the args after the executable name
get passed to the executable.  Also, the input doesn't get handed off to
FvwmM4 to be parsed before FVWM gets it.  This may be not worth the
trouble, given that I'm really asking for a new feature in m4 (but to
ensure compatibility across platforms, I don't want to just add an
extension to GNU m4).  Passing the args to PipeRead would really help in
eliminating the need for separate executables passed along with FVWM
configurations, thus increasing security and reducing setup difficulties.

Greg J. Badros
[email-masked]
http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gjb

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