[xmonad] sh-less spawn?

[Ferenc Wagner]

Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de> writes:

> -- | Like 'spawn', but returns the 'ProcessID' of the launched application
> spawnPID :: MonadIO m => String -> m ProcessID
> spawnPID x = io . forkProcess . finally nullStdin $ do
>                 uninstallSignalHandlers
>                 createSession
>                 executeFile "/bin/sh" False ["-c", x] Nothing
>
> Generally, this is of course useful. But I bet that most commands passed
> to spawn are simple program names without arguments or any fancy
> shell-related stuff. Executing a shell here seems overkill. Not much,
> but still avoidable.
>
> How about checking whether the argument x contains only alphanumerical
> characters and, if that is the case, executing the program directly?
> Such short-circuit logic is for example also used by perl’s sytem(), see
> perldoc -f system:

I'm not a big fan of perl's all-implicit behaviour.  I'd rather rename
spawn(PID) to

spawnShell(PID) x = spawn(PID) "/bin/sh" ["-c", x]

and make the shell invocation explicit.  If such incompatible change is
impossible, then make it

spawn(PID) x = execute(PID) "/bin/sh" ["-c", x]

or similar.  Meanwhile, use exec to get rid of the shell process. :)
-- 
Regards,
Feri.