notify-program unable to handle arguments

[tsipinakis]

Newsbeuter version (copy from newsbeuter -v): 2.10-3df01

notify-program doesn't properly handle command line arguments.

• Case 1, without quotes:

With notify-program notify --arg in the config, notify is called without any arguments:

DEBUG: controller:notify: notifying external program `notify'
DEBUG: utils::run_command: notify '100 unread articles'

• Case 2, with quotes:

With notify-program "notify --arg" in the config, the entire string is attempted to be executed as an executable:

DEBUG: controller:notify: notifying external program `notify --arg'
DEBUG: utils::run_command: notify --arg '100 unread articles'¬
DEBUG: utils::run_command: execlp of notify --arg failed: No such file or directory

[Minoru]

Turns out we have three ways to run an external executable: utils::run_interactively, utils::run_program and utils::run_command. notify-program is interpreted by the last one, and it indeed doesn't split the command into arguments—it just calls execlp. This is inconsistent with two other functions, which pass their arguments to /bin/sh.

We can't simply do the same in run_command because we have to be sure that the argument we're passing to notify-program isn't mangled by the shell.

TODO:

• [ ] check if run_interactively and run_program need to take the same care of their arguments;
• [ ] figure out how to better modify run_command so that it doesn't duplicate shell's functionality (path lookup, tilde expansion, environment variable expansion, maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting).

Setting this aside for now.