Sometimes quoting strings or shell invocations can be a bit verbose or clumsy in the shell when passing arguments to exec functions (-X) because those arguments have to be quoted with an extra layer since they are parsed as EDN.
This example was recently posted in Slack:
clojure -X:bench :json "$(my_json_producing_cmd --blah)"
and it turned out nearly impossible to pass the JSON as an argument.
Having a way to bypass EDN parsing for such arguments could alleviate that problem.
One possible convention could be to use a leading character which would otherwise be invalid in EDN, such as the / sign:
clojure -X:bench :json /"$(my_json_producing_cmd --blah)"
Alternative approaches:
Use metadata on the function to opt out of processing: that would change the parsing behavior at the implementation side, e.g.:
(defn foo
{:tools.deps/exec-skip-edn-read #{:a}}
[{:keys [a b c]}]
...)
Add something to deps.edn config in :exec-args: that would only change the behavior for consumers
Extra things to consider:
- The convention should play well with both bash, cmd.exe and Powershell and not mean anything special in the syntax of those shells. I tried / in these shells and this does not seem to interfere.
After experimentation I found that / might work better than @ since @ has a special meaning in powershell:
bb -e "*command-line-args*" /foo @bar
("/foo")
Also @ often means: slurp contents from file and inline that content as arg.
