This macro will read a pointer of any type, return it, and set the
pointer to NULL. This is useful as an explicit concept of passing
ownership of a memory area between pointers.
This takes inspiration from Rust:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/enum.Option.html#method.take
and was suggested by Alan Jenkins (@sourcejedi).
It drops ~160 lines of code from our codebase, which makes me like it.
Also, I think it clarifies passing of ownership, and thus helps
readability a bit (at least for the initiated who know the new macro)
Also called "ANSI-C Quoting" in info:(bash) ANSI-C Quoting.
The escaping rules are a POSIX proposal, and are described in
http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=249. There's a lot of back-and-forth on
the details of escaping of control characters, but we'll be only using a small
subset of the syntax that is common to all proposals and is widely supported.
Unfortunately dash and fish and maybe some other shells do not support it (see
the man page patch for a list).
This allows environment variables to be safely exported using show-environment
and imported into the shell. Shells which do not support this syntax will have
to do something like
export $(systemctl show-environment|grep -v '=\$')
or whatever is appropriate in their case. I think csh and fish do not support
the A=B syntax anyway, so the change is moot for them.
Fixes#5536.
v2:
- also escape newlines (which currently disallowed in shell values, so this
doesn't really matter), and tabs (as $'\t'), and ! (as $'!'). This way quoted
output can be included directly in both interactive and noninteractive bash.
Why the strange name: the prefix is necessary to follow our own advice that
environment generators should have numerical prefixes. I also put -d- in the
name because otherwise the name was very easy to mistake with
systemd.environment-generator. This additional letter clarifies that this
on special generator that supports environment.d files.
Lennart Poettering