rlm_exec and quoted strings?

[Brian Candler]

This is something I came across while doing some refactoring (#186), and
I thought I'd raise it here for discussion.

When exec splits a line into an argv array, at the moment any quoted values
retain their quotes.  For example,

    %{exec:/bin/bash -c 'echo -n hello world'}

gives argv of

    "/bin/bash"
    "-c"
    "'echo -n hello world'"    // note the enclosed single-quotes

which doesn't work:

    /bin/bash: echo -n hello world: command not found

I think it should strip the outer quotes, but as this is a behaviour change
I wonder if anyone could be relying on the old behaviour? Does this need
to be made configurable with a flag?

Some code which implements this change and also factors out the argv
splitting into rad_expand_xlat() is at
https://github.com/candlerb/freeradius-server/commits/candlerb/expand_xlat
(for v2.x.x)

The reason for looking at this is to be able to share the argv splitting
code with rlm_redis, e.g.  %{redis:LPUSH 'my key' %{User-Name}} where
User-Name may also contain spaces.

Comments welcomed.

Regards,

Brian.