TL;DR

The lazy approach to run an external command in dew.

One of the handy things that dew does is accept a shell command in the top part, execute it and then parse the JSON result to show it in the middle and lower sections.

So, of course, it needs to support executing the command.

I was initially thinking about parsing the command line, taking care of single and double quotes to properly get all parameters right, when I suddenly realized that I already had a solution.

It’s /bin/sh -c.

So there we have it, at line 152:

my $runner = sub { system {'/bin/sh'} '/bin/sh', '-c', $command };

This allows passing the shell a whole command line as a single string; the shell will take care to parse it properly and execute it. Hence, we “just” have to execute it and get the results back, which is done in two possible ways depending on whether we want to capture the standard error (e.g. to show it in a dialog box) or we’re fine with printing it outside our curses environment:

if ($self->{get_stderr}) {
   ($stdout, $stderr, $exit) = capture { $runner->() };
}
else {
   ($stdout, $exit) = capture_stdout { $runner->() };
}

The first one will capture STDERR (placing it in $stderr), while the second will pass the STDERR directly to the terminal.

It’s interesting that capture and capture_stdout from Capture::Tiny are defined with prototypes that allow using the fancy syntax a-la grep/map and the like. Alas, the similarity is not perfect, so I was initially doing this:

capture $runner;

just to receive an error. We have to put an explicit block of code there! Whatever, it does its job, so it’s good for me.

Stay safe!