Re: psychiatric help

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2026 at 2:33 PM Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>      print -rS "$~@" # Easy.  No fuss, no muss, no bother.

This is wrong for several reasons:
1) The ~ isn't helping anything because it means to enable globbing,
but then the whole thing is in quotes which means among other things
not to glob.
2) print -S expects a single word, but "$@" is an array any time $# is 2 or more

I think you mean
  print -rS -- "$*" # one word, history re-parses it

>      _execute_output="$( eval "$~@" )"  # Save output to an array variable.

Again, "eval" is doing all the work here and the ~ isn't helping.

> > Another problem is that what we're calling 3a is constantly changing.
> Wouldn't it be whatever command it about to be executed?

During processing of a function body, everything in that body is at
some point a command about to be executed.

foo() {
  # Before foo starts, 3a might be what you want
  setopt localoptions extendedglob  # Oops, new 3a
  args_of_foo=( $@ )  # 3a just changed again
  # and so on
}

How do you tell the shell when to "grab" 3a?

> eval "$~@"
>
> ... without the eval

You probably mean
  output=$( ${(e)~@} )
that is
 -- remove the quotes to allow expansion
 -- (e) to expand embedded $var
 -- tilde to enable globbing

Or maybe you don't want the (e), I have no idea what $@ values are at
this point.