Comments in args file about cmdargs

[ndmitchell]

Seems a reasonable thing to do - only question is what should the comment syntax be? Can you find any other similar args files that use comments? I'd prefer to copy rather than do something different.

[alensiljak]

Hi! Thanks a lot for the feedback. I'm coming from the viewpoint of parsing the arguments for ledger-style argument files, also used in hledger.
Ledger supports the following characters for comments: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Commenting-on-your-Journal

Naturally, I would not expect cmdargs to follow ledger's specs but some of those are common comment chars, like # and ;. Perhaps others, too, but I'm mostly using these two. That might be a good start?

Edit: Technically, arguments start with -- or / or a letter [A-z][a-z] or a number [0-9]? So, in theory, any other special character might a comment. But that would be too restrictive.

[simonmichael]

Count me interested too. The recent https://www.stevegattuso.me/tech-stack/finances-budgeting.html#args has some nice examples of args files commented with #, but I'm not sure this actually works - it doesn't for me.

The only docs I have found for the argument file format are at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53995002/where-does-shell-argument-files-or-files-originate-from .

[bsima]

The recent https://www.stevegattuso.me/tech-stack/finances-budgeting.html#args has some nice examples of args files commented with #, but I'm not sure this actually works - it doesn't for me.

Presumably this was just an annotated example and the # comments aren't actually part of the files

[simonmichael]

The implementation is here: https://github.com/ndmitchell/cmdargs/blob/master/System/Console/CmdArgs/Explicit/ExpandArgsAt.hs#L7

Ignoring lines beginning with # or whitespace and # would be easy. Correctly ignoring end-of-line # comments is harder, it would be nice not to break quoted arguments containing #. Or you could ignore shell quoting rules, as I suspect java does (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/tools/java.htm#JSWOR-GUID-4856361B-8BFD-4964-AE84-121F5F6CF111 : Use the number sign # in the argument file to identify comments. All characters following the# are ignored until the end of line.)