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Comment by hanula | Hacker News Reader

Despite how great it is, the need of escaping ? and & characters or using quotes is very annoying...

How is this different from POSIX sh?

Simple case: working with URLs. curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723235 works in sh and bash, doesn't in fish.

This is a feature. See https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/683. It appears to work in bash, but only because globs simply write themselves if they won't find anything. The behavior is misleading. But also having to escape ? is somewhat annoying.

Also, URLs with & don't work in bash anyway. Or rather, they will work, but do something you wouldn't expect - it would ignore & and everything after it, and run command in the background.

Please note that zsh works similarly to fish. Well, mostly. It seems that zsh has special logic that automatically inserts backslash before ? if it detects an URL. Perhaps that could be implemented in fish. But it also feels somewhat magical. Why "\?" would appear when I type "?"? But perhaps it's the best way. In your case, it's possible to break it. But the break looks really contrived, so perhaps zsh behavior would be safe.

  [glitchmr@pineapple tmp]$ mkdir -p https://news.ycombinator.com
  [glitchmr@pineapple tmp]$ touch https://news.ycombinator.com/itemsid=5723235
  [glitchmr@pineapple tmp]$ wget https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723235
  --2013-05-17 13:39:09--  https://news.ycombinator.com/itemsid=5723235
  Resolving news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)... 184.172.10.74
  Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|184.172.10.74|:443... connected.
  HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
  2013-05-17 13:39:10 ERROR 404: Not Found.

Right, makes perfect sense of course as the standard goes. Sometimes just wish URLs were handled in special way in shells. Fish isn't compatible with bash, couldn't it go step further? Some magic isn't always bad...

You give bash more credit than it deserves. `wget url?a=1&b=2` is parsed as`wget url?a=1 & ; b=2` ie, it runs `wget url?a=1` in the background and sets the shell variable b=2.

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