jobs can print commands on multiple lines

[pacien]

If a command spanning over multiple lines is sent to background, the jobs
command also prints that command over multiple lines in its output. This makes
parsing it harder.

As a consequence, count (jobs) does not return the expected result in that
case. (A workaround is to use count (jobs -g) instead).

For example, this returns a count of 2 instead of 1 job:

> sleep \
    1000 &

> jobs
Job	Group	CPU	State	Command
1	2667403	0%	running	sleep \
1000 &

> count (jobs)
2

It could be nicer to force the content of the "Command" field to stay on one
line.

Fish version 3.6.1 on Linux (NixOS).

[elyashiv]

Hi,

I started looking into implementing this, and there are a few things that are needed to be considered, and I would like to hear other poeple opinios on them.

1. Should this be the deffault behaviour or behind a flag?
2. What to print if the the command is multiline? one option is to just trim (with an elipsis?) another is to replace the new lines with some other string (space? a literal \n?)
3. Another option to "fix" this is to get a more pipe friendly output - an array or a null delimited list of the jobs (like find -print0). What do you think of that?

[faho]

Should this be the deffault behaviour or behind a flag?

The default behavior shouldn't break like this so not a flag.

In general we try to make the default behavior good, adding flags is extremely tempting if you don't want to decide, but makes for a poor experience.

another is to replace the new lines with some other string (space? a literal \n?)

If we were to replace, we would escape it like string escape does. I.e. it would use the escape_string() function, so it's like other places where we incorporate arbitrary fish script.

an array or a null delimited list of the jobs (like find -print0)

I don't believe this specific thing is all that useful to pipe so I don't think this is needed. For the most part you'll see count like that.

Escaping is fine.

[elyashiv]

There are a few other placces that print a command string to the user.

Some that I found:

• disown.cpp
• fish_job_summary.fish
• proc.cpp (print_exit_for_jobs)

As they are not suppose to be parsed by a script, I'm not sure we want to escape them.