[tahoe-dev] CLI mkdir inverse?

[Kevin Reid]

On May 4, 2009, at 23:40, Zooko O'Whielacronx wrote:

> If users had to cut and paste or back-tick-back-tick a cap onto the
> command-line every time they wanted to access a directory, at least
> they wouldn't mistakenly think that access was being stored somewhere
> in Tahoe.

The problem with this is that argv is not private to users on Unix  
systems; so if you use a shared machine you absolutely must not ever  
transfer a cap by the command line.

Yeah, it's lousy.

If you want an dynamic-externally-provided-cap interface, take a  
filename and read it. Then /dev/fd names can be used for dynamic  
input, e.g. using bash <() for it.

tahoe ls ~/mydir.cap
   (where mydir.cap is a file containing a tahoe cap)

tahoe ls ~/mydir.cap/myfile
   (This is unambiguous but requires a bit of scanning to figure it  
out: If you have a pathname with a filename where a directory should  
be, then treat it as a file-containing-a-Tahoe-cap and take the rest  
of the path as the path within the Tahoe directory so named.  
Precedent: Subversion file: and svn: repository URLs work this way.)

tahoe ls <(head -1 bunch-of-tahoe-caps.txt)
   (If you want to do some computation to get the cap, this is the way  
to do it. bash's <() connects a pipe to the stdout of the process in  
parens, gives the read end to an arbitrary fd in the top level  
process, and designates it by passing /dev/fd/N in the argument  
position where <() is.)

-- 
Kevin Reid                            <http://homepage.mac.com/kpreid/>