YJL

I got the warning message (not error) when I tried to add a file with colon (:) in its filename to a Hg repo. The repo is basically private, I don't intent to publish it to public, but I think it's still worth to resolve the issue even I don't use Windows.

There are some restrictions on file naming on Windows/DOS file systems. The message was added by a patch and there was a bug report related to this issue. I don't know what will happen if you try to clone such repo, but I am guessing files with illegal names will not be updated into working directory.

From that bug report, there is no remapping to work around, so it is best not to use anything may cause issues on different file systems. By default, it's only a warning, you can still commit the addition action.

If you don't want to see such warning, you can update your hgrc by adding:

[ui]
portablefilenames = ignore

which will suppress the warning message. If you want to stop the actions may cause issues, then gives it abort. You can read more about this configuration in man 5 hgrc.

When I am writing blog posts using reStructuredText, I have F5 bound to running an external script with current filename using %. The external script generates temporary file with template, which I can preview in browser with. The post title is extracted from the filename.

Inevitably, characters like \' or ! are used sometimes. If you have used shell long enough, you will know those characters may cause issues if they are not quoted or escaped correctly.

Since I am just a normal Vim user, not really have much knowledge and experience of coding for Vim configuration. But this time, I managed to put together stuff to get away from escaping issue.

My original keybinding is as the following:

map <F5> <ESC>:w<CR>:!gen-blog-rst.sh '%'<CR>

It saves the file, then run the gen-blog-rst.sh script. As you can see \'%\' definitely will have issues with \' character. I found out there is a Vim function shellescape() which does what I expect:

:echo shellescape("\"blah\" 'foorbar' blah!")
" outputs the following string
'"blah" '\''foorbar'\'' blah!'

You can safely pass to :!some_command as an argument. It will be like running (my default shell is Bash):

bash -c some_command '"blah" '\''foorbar'\'' blah!'

This some_command will get that long word from $1.

The problem is when using :!{cmd}, I can not put anything function in it, it is basically a plain string be passed to your default shell. I dont know if Vim has something like Command Substitution in Bash to work in string, if it does, let me know.

The solution I found for this part is to use :exec[ute] to wrap it up:

:exec '!gen-blog-rst.sh ' . shellescape(%)

So, the final map is:

map <F5> <ESC>:w<CR>:exec '!gen-blog-rst.sh ' . shellescape(%)<CR>

Note that % is used for the function, instead of just %. I used this to update my vimrc.