Custom move and copy command works in terminal but not in lf subshell

[jan0sch]

Hi,

I followed some instructions to setup custom copy and move commands to preserve file attributes (like timestamps) with rsync and mv. However on some files these operations are not executed and lf does never display an error. Some digging found that while rsync (for copy) seems robust for most of the cases mv is more picky. So I adjusted the code and have now something like this:

cmd paste &{{
  while read -r line; do
    set -- "$@" "$(printf '%q' $line)"
  done < ~/.local/share/lf/files
  mode="$1"
  shift
  case "$mode" in
    copy)
      echo "lf-paste in ${PWD}: rsync -av --backup -- $@ ." >> ~/.cache/lf.log
      rsync -av --backup --progress -- "$@" . |
      stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 tr '\r' '\n' |
      while IFS= read -r line; do
        lf -remote "send $id echo $line"
      done
      ;;
    move)
      echo "lf-paste in ${PWD}: mv -n -- $@ ." >> ~/.cache/lf.log
      mv -n -- $@ .;;
  esac
  rm ~/.local/share/lf/files
  lf -remote "send clear"
}}

But this still does not work, especially if files or directories contain special characters like spaces. However the arguments are escaped properly and I can simply copy the command from my made-up logfile and execute it and it will work just fine. But it does not from the subshell of lf. Debugging there brings error messages like:

mv: rename /some/path/with/escaped\ spaces/file.txt to ./file.txt: No such file or directory

The line from my log will say something like this:

lf-paste in some-directory: mv -n -- /some/path/with/escaped\ spaces/file.txt .

and I can copy the mv command from there paste it into a terminal and it will run without problems. I already tried quoting $@ (i.e. tried "$@" and $@) but that didn't have any effect.

As mentioned rsync works nearly all of the time but there I've also had this behaviour occasionally.

Any ideas what could cause this issue?

lf: 31
go: 1.20
shell: zsh 5.9
os: freebsd 14

Kind regards

[joelim-work]

I think it's because $@ is already an array (where elements can contain spaces), so there is no need to use "$(printf '%q' $line)". Do soing ends up adding a literal backslash into the array element and results in a 'no such file' error because now the filename actually contains \.

I changed the line at the top to just set -- "$@" "$line" and the script works for me.

[jan0sch]

Awesome, thanks! That really did it. ❤️