two arguments problem with quotes

[jaker-dotcom]

Hello there!

I ran into trouble but fixed the problem myself. Am posting anyway for gaining a better understanding. I am trying to run a couple of commands with entr and expand one of the commands with parameter expansion. I created a function in .profile

entrtaskprojfunction () {
	ls ~/.task/pending.data | entr -c task project:$1 rc.gc=0 2>~/.task/taskerrormessages.txt | grep  "\."
}
alias entrtaskproj='entrtaskprojfunction'

Now I want to be able to specify the project I want to work on and have it display the tasks within that project and have it reload upon changes to the task database.

The problem: I first didn't get it to clear the screen. I think was because of piping into grep not being part of the command entr runs. I know that you can run two commands like in #7 but that doesn't work due to the double-quotes which I need for both the shell parameter expansion. Now I put sh -c in front and add double-quotes around both commands. I thus needed to change the quotes around the expression for grep to single-quotes. This did the trick. But suppose I want to have entr run commands which require double-quotes themselves (e.g. displaying with echo what project the tasks belong to). Is there a shell inbuilt way of managing such cases? Or would it be necessary to create a script for this?

Here my code which solved the problem:

entrtaskprojfunction () {
	ls ~/.task/pending.data | entr -c sh -c "task proj:$1 rc.gc=0 2>~/.task/taskerrormessages.txt | grep  '\.'"
}

If nobody feels like answering to this just delete the issue, I understand that this is not really entr-related but due to me being rather new to the shell.

Thanks!
Jaker

[eradman]

Your question is fair because entr a command-line utility.

I suppose the most comprehensive solution is to wrap complex functionality in another script

entrtaskprojfunction () {
    ls ~/.task/pending.data | entr -c "./run-task.sh $1"
}

There is also a -s flag which is intended as a shorthand for sh -c

The first thing you can try is mixing double-and single quotes

entr -c -s "echo 'one   two'" 

You should also be able to escape double quotes

entr -c -s "echo \"one   two\"" 

Let me know if this helps!

[jaker-dotcom]

I feel like knowing that escaping quotes is possible will come handy in the future. Thanks!