Watchman should escape color codes in environment variables before logging them about watchman

[wez]

The log is there primarily to figure out what is broken, and I'd rather avoid stripping for two reasons:

• it will drive up the cost of logging
• it can mask potential problems by obscuring what was actually being set.

Tailing the log file should be a rare event; is there something that is causing you to do this frequently?

[mganjoo]

So my use case is to scp a jar file to a server every time it's successfully built. I want to see whether that is happening correctly, and as a quick solution, I simply tail the watchman log (while scp -v is set, so that I can see what the command is up to). I guess that's not the idiomatic way to do things, and that I should write a command that handles its own logging instead?

[wez]

One of the things that people find awkward about triggers is that they are headless and continue running even when your terminal session is over. This is a feature but is a bit different from most of the other watchers out there.

One of the things on my mental TODO (although I could have sworn I had it transcribed in an issue here) is to have a session-oriented trigger mode, where you would do something like:

$ watchman fg-trigger <pattern> -- <command>

and that process would subscribe to the watchman service and spawn in your terminal session whenever matching files are changed. It could then log that it was running. Pressing CTRL-C would stop it from triggering, just like a regular unix command.

Since we don't have this today, another suggestion for you is to write a little wrapper script around the log subscriber command:

$  watchman --server-encoding=json --persistent log-level error | grep scp

or do something a bit more fancy to munge and format the json records as you prefer. You can play with the log level to adjust verbosity.

[mganjoo]

That makes sense. The log wrapper suggestion seems like it would serve my purposes. Thanks!

[wez]

I'll close this out as it doesn't require any code change in watchman itself; Thanks!