[cmake-developers] Documentation of execute_process COMMAND needs work

[Alan W. Irwin]

The execute_process documentation currently says nothing about the
form of commands that are acceptable to COMMAND.  From experience I
have discovered that shell redirection symbols such as "<" for stdin
and ">" for stdout do not work for a single command like they do for
add_custom_* COMMANDS. That different behaviour is consistent, of
course, with how stdin, stdout, and stderr are handled in a special
manner in execute_process for multiple commands that are always
handled as a pipeline, but user's shouldn't have to discover that
experimentally.  But the big question the documentation should answer
beyond a quick remark about "redirection symbols not allowed in the
command, use INPUT_FILE, OUTPUT_FILE, and ERROR_FILE instead" is
whether the command is in the form accepted elsewhere in add_custom_*
COMMANDs VERBATIM or non-VERBATIM modes (there is no execute_process
VERBATIM so it is difficult to figure out which of those modes is
used) or indeed whether there are other idiosyncracies for the
execute_process COMMAND form the user should be aware of?

Is someone inspired to fix this documentation issue right away, or do
you want me to create a bugtracker item for this issue?

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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