[Toybox] Defect in Argument parsing for "#" and "-"

[Ashwini Sharma]

On 7/4/12, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> On 07/02/2012 10:05 PM, Ashwini Sharma wrote:
>> Hi Rob,
>>
>>  I was using '#' for accepting a integer parameter. As per the parsing
>> logic
>> you used function atolx(), for converting the string to long. This
>> function assumes suffixes with the supplied string. There are
>> possibilities that user may not want suffixes to be there, i.e. any
>> alpha char in the argument should be treated as "Invalid Argument".
>>
>> Also for the cases where user has only supplied a suffix, without any
>> number, atolx will return 0, which may not be the desired case.
>>
>> I had a case where depth of traversal was to be defined as cmdline
>> argument.
>> Giving "kmgtpe" would return zero, whereas I wanted it to only
>> integers as argument and no alpha characters.
>
> Understood.  Question: why?
>
>> Hence I am of the opinion that,
>>
>>   1. It should be treated as "Invalid Argument" if no number is specified
>> And
>>   2. It should be configurable, if a feature wants the suffixes to be
>> handled or not.
>>
>> Please do provide your opinion.
>
> I can grab a third character (maybe %) for literal long. The tradeoff
> here is between generic behavior (which can share code) and precise
> behavior that does exactly what you want. Some things need suffixes, so
> I made everything accept suffixes by default because I didn't see the
> harm. Apparently you do. Could you explain the harm to me?

 I was looking at this from the perspective where I do not want any
alpha chars for the argument, not even Suffixes. Else I don't see any
harm in it.

>
> (It's not that much extra code, but it's extra code you can't configure
> out because it's in the generic code shared by all commands...)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rob
> --
> GNU/Linux isn't: Linux=GPLv2, GNU=GPLv3+, they can't share code.
> Either it's "mere aggregation", or a license violation.  Pick one.
>

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