String interpolation for backtick-quoted paths

[NotTheDr01ds]

String interpolation for backtick-quoted paths

[kubouch]

The output of a string interpolation is a string, so that IMO works as intended.

Adding a bareword interpolation could work, I think, but the difference between

ls $`($nu.default-config-dir)/*.nu`

vs.

ls $"($nu.default-config-dir)/*.nu"

might not be obvious. It might seem confusing that one expands and the other doesn't.

[NotTheDr01ds]

It might seem confusing that one expands and the other doesn't.

Given that a backtick-quoted string is supposed to represent a path, it will hopefully be obvious that the behavior should be different. But also, to be fair, the backtick quoted behavior is already different (and should be):

• ls `*` : Returns a list of all files in the current directory matching the glob pattern *
• ls '*': Returns a file or directory literally named *

The feature request is just to add string-interpolation so that we can do it dynamically once again (without into glob).

[NotTheDr01ds]

Adding a bareword interpolation could work

Hmm - What would that look like?

[kubouch]

Backticks define barewords, not strings. The intention of backticks is to have a similar behavior as if you typed the words without anything (this it not 100% consistent everywhere but that's the intention). So

$`...`

would be a bareword interpolation, not a string interpolation.

[WindSoilder]

Follows the same rules to backtick-quoted word, I think we can't assign bareword interpolation to a variable.

[kubouch]

Yeah. In theory, the following should be identical:

let x = git status
let x = `git status`

They both should run the command and save the result to x (in reality, the backticks seem to be broken in this case). On the other hand, let x = 'git status' will save the string to x.

[NotTheDr01ds]

Ok, so somewhere in the past I had read that backticks indicated a path, but that's not really the case.

I probably need to close this as an X/Y problem, but is there any way we can get string interpolation to work with globs short of into glob? It's something we used to have - it was nice and clean. Now we've lost it.

Personally, I'd much rather have to escape * with str escape-glob when I want a literal * in a string. I admit that I could be missing a 'bigger picture' here, but personally it seems to me that the wrong decision was made here. If an asterisk is found in a string, and that string is treated as a path, isn't it far more likely that the user intended it to be a glob than a literal character? Same with using ~ and other "path-like" characters.

When I started having to modify my scripts to add into glob, it seemed like a huge step backwards in usability. I was thinking perhaps backticks would be a suitable workaround, but that doesn't seem to be the case either.

[kubouch]

We made it stricter to avoid unwanted glob expansion. Now, the rules are more consistent and predictable, you can look up the PR that added into glob and related issues for more context, it solved numerous problems. If we auto-expand by default and require std escape-glob, we'd have users complaining about that. Can't have both.