Cannot pass filenames containing spaces through `path`

[SamWilsn]

Probably true for a bunch of other weird characters too, like \n.

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

Through which path? Could you help me with an example?

[SamWilsn]

Of course! The last line of this snippet:

      - name: Run CodeSpell
        if: steps.changed-files.outputs.any-changed == 'true'
        uses: codespell-project/actions-codespell@v2
        with:
          check_filenames: true
          ignore_words_file: ./codespell-whitelist
          path: ${{ steps.changed-files.outputs.changed-files }}

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

Understood, thank you for the example. I must confess I don't know much about GitHub actions. I do see parameter path documented, but am not sure how it is processed. Could this be a YAML question more than a question on actions-codespell?

[SamWilsn]

I've done some very surface level digging, and it looks like the problem occurs here:

actions-codespell/entrypoint.sh

Line 49 in 406322e

res=`{ { codespell --count ${command_args} ${INPUT_PATH}; echo $? 1>&4; } 1>&5; } 4>&1`

INPUT_PATH is the value from the path input in the action, and it is passed into codespell as one-or-more arguments. Unfortunately, that means a file here is a file.md would get parsed by bash as four separate arguments: here, is, a, and file.md.

The safer way to pass an environment variable as an argument would be to enclose it in quotes:

res=`{ { codespell --count ${command_args} "${INPUT_PATH}"; echo $? 1>&4; } 1>&5; } 4>&1` 

But I don't know if that would be an acceptable solution, since using a space-delimited list has been recommended a few times.

[peternewman]

INPUT_PATH is the value from the path input in the action, and it is passed into codespell as one-or-more arguments. Unfortunately, that means a file here is a file.md would get parsed by bash as four separate arguments: here, is, a, and file.md.

The safer way to pass an environment variable as an argument would be to enclose it in quotes:

res=`{ { codespell --count ${command_args} "${INPUT_PATH}"; echo $? 1>&4; } 1>&5; } 4>&1` 

But I don't know if that would be an acceptable solution, since using a space-delimited list has been recommended a few times.

Yes, we shouldn't quote it within the command @SamWilsn as that would preclude all those options. As well as if people wanted to use single quotes or backslash escapes or...

To quote (if you'll pardon the pun) yourself:

The safer way to pass an environment variable as an argument would be to enclose it in quotes

So if you quote your argument(s) into actions-codespell, it should all work as intended.

Your "changed-files" step implies it could output multiple files already, so that would also break if it was quoted.

Can you not get your existing previous step to quote the arguments, or use xargs?

[SamWilsn]

I did actually attempt to quote my arguments, but ran into a weirdness with POSIX shells. You can see this effect with:

$ export CHANGED_FILES="'first file' 'second file'"
$ cat $CHANGED_FILES
cat: "'first": No such file or directory
cat: "file'": No such file or directory
cat: "'second": No such file or directory
cat: "file'": No such file or directory

I haven't found a satisfactory way around this. In fact, the only way I've found to interpret an environment variable with quotes is with eval:

$ export CHANGED_FILES="'first file' 'second file'"
$ eval cat $CHANGED_FILES
cat: 'first file': No such file or directory
cat: 'second file': No such file or directory

[peternewman]

Yeah I'm not sure sorry.

I'd agree that either of these work:

cat "first file" "second file"
cat: 'first file': No such file or directory
cat: 'second file': No such file or directory

cat first\ file second\ file
cat: 'first file': No such file or directory
cat: 'second file': No such file or directory

But yes, from a quick try I can't sort a way to do it in one environment variable. I suspect it really wants to be an array of some sort.

[SamWilsn]

With other actions, I've been getting by with a hack of splitting on newlines (my "changed files" action will error if it finds a filename with one), but that isn't a general solution.

What would you think about re-implementing your entrypoint in python, and taking JSON as input?

GitHub Actions has great support for JSON (toJSON / fromJSON), you could implement backwards compatible support (keep path as is, put the new functionality in a new input), and requires no new dependencies since you already use a Python base image.