escape string in __VIRTUAL_ENV__ path for bash

[davidbstein]

Fixes issue #53 in bash and shell only. Uses the printf %q "shell quote" formatter. Falls back to quoting some characters that universally need to be escaped.

Fallback is needed because while bash's printf command has the %q formatter, the builtin function printf may not.

(edit): removed irrelevant link

[Ivoz]

Hi there, you need to actually commit changes for virtualenv_embedded/activate.sh as well.

Did you understand not to do so from reading the documentation somewhere? If so we need to clarify it for everyone.

[davidbstein]

Hi Matt -

Completely my fault, have had a fix locally for a while and pushed it
upstream without checking contributing.rst - docs are quite clear. Sorry.

[Ivoz]

Hi @davidbstein upon looking further, I don't see how this solves #53 at all?

The #! line is interpreted by the system kernel, not bash.

[pfmoore]

Regardless of whether this PR does fix the problem, would it be worth adding a test that demonstrates the issue, so we'd at least be able to see the problem via a test?

[davidbstein]

thanks for the quick review!

@Ivoz - AFAICT, #53 is caused by the bad entry in PATH, not the malformed shebang - easy_install and pip work again with this change (testing on Ubuntu and OSX - escaping the PATH fixes the issue, escaping the shebang line does not). Fixing the shebang line seems like a good idea - I'll try to dig into a good way to do that.

@pfmoore - tests seem like a great idea. Will add one.

[Ivoz]

@davidbstein so after manually applying your patch to test,

I created a new virtualenv called "h a", confirm the patch is in the new virtualenv:

(h\ a) ivo·ivosung ~/code/pypa/virtualenv/h a/bin develop $ cat activate | grep 'VIRTUAL_ENV='
# VIRTUAL_ENV="/home/ivo/code/pypa/virtualenv/h a"
VIRTUAL_ENV=$(printf %q "/home/ivo/code/pypa/virtualenv/h a") || VIRTUAL_ENV=$(echo "/home/ivo/code/pypa/virtualenv/h a" | sed 's/[ ()$;]/\\&/g')

Yes, we've managed to escape it in the $PATH:

(h\ a) ivo·ivosung ~/code/pypa/virtualenv/h a/bin develop $ echo $PATH
/home/ivo/code/pypa/virtualenv/h\ a/bin:/home/ivo/bin:/hom...

But, We can't escape the hashbang problem:

(h\ a) ivo·ivosung ~/code/pypa/virtualenv/h a/bin develop $ pip -h
/home/ivo/.pyenv/plugins/pyenv-pip-rehash/libexec/pip: ./pip: "/home/ivo/code/pypa/virtualenv/h\: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
 126 (h\ a) ivo·ivosung ~/code/pypa/virtualenv/h a/bin develop $ easy_install -h
/home/ivo/.pyenv/plugins/pyenv-pip-rehash/libexec/easy_install: ./easy_install: "/home/ivo/code/pypa/virtualenv/h: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

So we've put an escape in the $VIRTUAL_ENV env var & $PATH, but paths could be resolved without that anyway; and we haven't fixed execution of scripts as shown above. So we still haven't fixed scripts being broken, as is title of #53

[Ivoz]

I'm pretty sure that escaping paths in $PATH is in fact incorrect. A) They don't get evaluated, hence no need or reason to process an escape, and B) bash / shell is not the only thing interacting with environment variables. A bash $PATH is split by colons, not by anything else.

I'm guessing that this is only working for you (or, appearing to work), because now that your patch with the backslash escape has made the virtualenv path invalid, when you type $ pip, $ easy_install etc you are finding working executable, but they are the global executables (I'd guess $ which pip will give you /usr/bin/pip) - we obviously don't want those. If you type $ ./bin/pip you will still find the command breaking from the space in the hashbang.