[arch-general] Dynamic Titles in urxvt (bash) Without Side Effects?

[Mantas Mikulėnas]

On 2011-11-16 15:51, Bastien Dejean wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I've added the following lines to my .bashrc:
>
>      case "$TERM" in
>          rxvt*|xterm*)
>              set -o functrace
>              trap '[ -z "$BASH_SOURCE" ]&&  printf "%b" "\e]0;$BASH_COMMAND\a"' DEBUG>&  /dev/null
>              ;;
>      esac
>
> (It sets the current title of the current window according to the last
> ran command.)
>
> But alas, it generates side effects, if I issue this:
>
>      ls "$(ls -1 | head -1)"
>
> I get:
>
>      ls: cannot access foo.bar: No such file or directory
>
> Strange or trivial?

First, you are using `printf` the wrong way. Such sequences as \e]0; are 
supposed to be in the first argument, just like C printf():

     printf "\e]0;%s\a" "$BASH_COMMAND"

Your current method causes backslash escapes to be expanded not only in 
the literal \e and \a, but also in the value of $BASH_COMMAND; so, for 
example, if you ran this interactively:

     echo "\a is a bell"

then your current `printf` command would receive:

     \e]0;echo "\a is a bell"\a

which causes the title to be set to 'echo "', and the remainder text to 
be displayed normally (' is a bell"\a').

Second, your `ls` failure is caused by your `printf` output. It seems 
that the DEBUG trap handler is executed for subshells as well, with the 
trap handler's stdout being captured along with the actual command's 
stdout. In this case, $() will return your title-setting sequence. For 
example:

     echo "$(true)" > testfile

Normally, 'testfile' would be blank, but in this case...

You can sort of avoid this by redirecting the output to the proper 
location -- your terminal. (I'm not sure how reliable this is.)

     trap '[[ $BASH_SOURCE ]] ||
                 printf "\e]0;%s\a" "$BASH_COMMAND" >/dev/tty' DEBUG

-- 
Mantas M.