Regression in 0.7/1.0: shell mode doesn't handle & for backgrounding apps

[GlenHertz]

In shell mode in 0.6 you could launch a process into the background with gvim foo.txt&. With 0.7+ it tries to edit the file named foo.txt& in the foreground. Without being able to launch commands in the background it makes the shell much less useful.

[StefanKarpinski]

The shell mode is due for a bunch of improvements for 1.1, this would be a good one. The story here is that shell mode used to call an actual shell, but @vtjnash changed it to just use Julia's own internal command mechanism, which fixed some issues but made it considerably less functional. In order to get this kind of thing back, we would need to implement this syntax in Julia's command mode, or maybe in a souped up shell-mode variant of command mode.

[GlenHertz]

Sounds good. With Julia's awesome REPL I wouldn't be surprised if one day it had an awesome shell too...

[RalphAS]

Note that if you want a real shell, you can just invoke one with a few extra characters. I find it useful for things like file globbing. At least on Linux, the following works:

julia-1.1>

shell> sh -c "ls log*"
log.1 log.2

shell> sh -c "cut -d: -f3 /etc/passwd | sort -n | tail -n5"
117
501
1000
1001
65534

shell> sh -c "gvim foo.txt &"
[spawns and backgrounds gvim]