Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] rev5: support colon in filenames

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

On Wednesday 15 July 2009, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Blue Swirl wrote:
> > I bet this won't compile on win32.
> >
> > Instead of this (IMHO doomed) escape approach, maybe the filename
> > parameter could be specified as the next argument, for example:
> > -hda format=qcow2,blah,blah,filename_is_next_arg -hda "filename with
> > funky characters like ',' ':' & '!'"
>
> -drive name=hda,if=ide,cache=off -hda foo.img
> -drive name=vda,if=virtio,cache=writeback -vda foo.img
> -drive name=sdb,if=scsi,unit=1 -sdb boo.img
>
> But Paul has long objected to having -vda or -sda syntaxes.  I do agree
> though that the most sane thing to do is to make the filename an
> independent argument.

I dislike implicit ordering of arguments even less. Having -foo -bar behave 
differently to -bar -foo is bad. We already have this a bit for things like 
-net, but splitting something into two as a parsing hack seems really lame.

How about -drive args=whatever,unparsed_name=bah

Where unparsed_name is defined to be the last argument, and blah is 
interpreted literally.

Paul