Including square brackets in arguments does not pass to poe

[stephen-spar]

• version: 0.24.4
• system: macOS

Issue

When including square brackets in an argument (either positional or non-positional), it seems to break how poe sends along the arguments to the actual task.

Reproduction

# pyproject.toml

[tool.poe.tasks.hello]
cmd = "echo $name"
args = [{ name = "name", positional = true }]

This works as expected:

poe hello "world"
Poe => echo world
world

This does not:

poe hello "world[extra]"
Poe => echo

Use Case

I have a sequence command to install poetry packages (poe add) which runs poetry add $package, and then a second command to sync them with my dev container:

[tool.poe.tasks.add]
sequence = [{ cmd = "poetry add $package" }, { ref = "sync-dev-deps" }]
args = [{ name = "package", positional = true }]

All good if I'm trying to install something like django or numpy, but for something with "extra" packages (ex. django-anymail[mailgun]), I'm not able to utilize this command and need to fall back to poetry add "django-anymail[mailgun]".

Hopefully this isn't documented anywhere - if it is, feel free to point me in that direction and close the issue! Thanks so much for the awesome package, fits my needs exactly.

[nat-n]

Hi @stephen-spar, thanks for reporting this issue.

It looks like the square brackets from the argument are getting picked up in the cmd task as glob pattern to be interpreted. I agree that this is surprising, and I'm going to leave this issue open to think about how to improve it.

This is a quirk of the design at the intersection of how cmd tasks implement shell like features (including parameter expansion and glob expansion) and how they interpolate CLI arguments as env vars.

I think you can get around this by quoting the parameter expansion in your task definition like so:

[tool.poe.tasks.add]
sequence = [{ cmd = "poetry add \"$package\"" }, { ref = "sync-dev-deps" }]
args = [{ name = "package", positional = true }]

The logic here is similar to bash, where you can disable glob expansion with quotes.

[stephen-spar]

@nat-n ah, thank you for the workaround - works a treat. Appreciate your quick response, and again, thanks for the phenomenal tool, it vastly improves the DX of the project I'm working on. Keep up the great work!!

[nat-n]

The relevant behaviour of bash like pattern-matching/quote/escaping is documented here.