Bash Tilde Expansion about fabtools

[deanmalmgren]

I looked into this a bit and started to realize this was a bit more complicated than just fixing fabtools.require.directory. The reason this is a little tricky is that paths are used in ~17 files within the fabtools project:

[unix]$ grep -R path fabtools/ | cut -d: -f1 | grep -v tests | uniq | wc -l
      17

In some modules (like fabtools.require.files), path variables are quoted directly in the run/sudo/local call which raises the issue you're mentioning. In other modules (e.g. fabtools.files), we use pipes.quote to facilitate quoting of filenames and would also have the same problem. In the fabtools.python module, we use fabtools.utils.abspath to normalize relative paths which is similar to Fabric's fabric.utils.apply_lcwd, neither of which address tilde expansion.

One quick solution would be to omit the quoting of filenames altogether and rely on users to escape spaces in filenames just like they'd have to on the command line. This has the benefit of making command-line user expansion much easier, with the downside of not being able to use spaces in filenames.

Another more involved solution might be to develop a ubiquitous and consistent way of handling path manipulation (in Fabric itself?). Perhaps we could switch to manipulating paths through fabtools.utils.abspath throughout and adding the ability to handle tilde expansion there?

My personal preference would be for the quick unquoting solution, but I'm hesitant to implement in case the quoting was deliberate for some other reason.