rc-service --ifexists only accepts one word as a command

[Justinzobel]

I have tried using --ifexists to run a command with parameters, but it won't accept them.

Things I've tried are encasing the entire command in single and double quotes.

For example rc-service --ifexists caddy echo yes does not work but rc-service --ifexists caddy echo works and prints a blank line.

[navi-desu]

running arbitrary commands is not something we ever explicitly supported

additionally, i cannot reproduce here at all, rc-service --ifexists iwd echo yes prints a blank line then dozens of y

could you give some additional information? how is it failing, an error, or something else?

the only thing that --ifexists does in code, is exit with a success instead of error here:

	if ((service = rc_service_resolve(*argv)) == NULL) {
		if (if_exists)
			return 0;
		eerrorx("%s: service `%s' does not exist", applet, *argv);
	}

so it doesn't affect anything wrt to command parsing, something seems wrong here

[navi-desu]

I have tried using --ifexists to run a command with parameters

also openrc doesn't accept parameters to any of the commands, it accepts a list of commands to run in order

that is a bad design choice, but i did not manage to find a good way to change the behaviour without breakage yet

[Justinzobel]

running arbitrary commands is not something we ever explicitly supported

What was the intended use case of the command argument?

additionally, i cannot reproduce here at all, rc-service --ifexists iwd echo yes prints a blank line then dozens of y

Both echo and yes are different commands, I should have picked a better example like echo exists. I was expecting one line of yes as if echo yes had been run by itself.

that is a bad design choice, but i did not manage to find a good way to change the behaviour without breakage yet

A good way would be to accept something in quotes as one command, that way users can still run multiple commands but anything in quotes is run as one command with any arguments.

For example:
`rc-service --ifexsists caddy 'echo "Yes, Caddy exists, starting now ..."' 'rc-service caddy start``

This would run two commands, but with their respective arguments.

[navi-desu]

What was the intended use case of the command argument?

running the script's defined commands, start, stop, restart, any of $extra_commands, etc

`rc-service --ifexsists caddy 'echo "Yes, Caddy exists, starting now ..."' 'rc-service caddy start``

calling rc-service for a service, inside itself, should fail due to locks, but also start already prints "starting caddy..."

still, i'm not a fan of this because it introduces a lot of quoting issues