ascii-boxes/boxes

Better if the error prompt is more friendly

kkew3 opened this issue · 7 comments

kkew3 commented

Before I carefully went through the manual, I attempted to set the width only by boxes -s 70x. Apparently it would fail, but with prompt:

boxes: box size: Interrupted system call, '70x'

I believe it might be better to show a more friendly prompt when there's parsing error with option string, with something like "boxes: box size: illegal option string", for example. Thanks!

boxes version: 1.2.

tsjensen commented

Dang, this works for me! → echo foo | boxes -s 70x:

/********************************************************************/
/* foo                                                              */
/********************************************************************/

I agree it's kind of a gray area if this should be possible, but you deserve a better error message! 😉

What system are you on? Are you using a particular binary? How did you install it?

kkew3 commented

Thanks for your reply. I'm on mac OS Majove Version 10.14.1 (18B75). I installed by brew install boxes.

tsjensen commented

Is it 32bit or 64bit?

(I don't have direct access to a Mac, but I'll try to get a colleague to try your case. It may take some time though, as everybody is on Christmas vacation currently.)

kkew3 commented

It's 64bit.

Thanks. No problem. It should be written as -s 70 anyway, as per the manual.

tsjensen commented

It turned out I didn't get access to a Mac, but I believe I fixed it by looking closely at the code.
Do give it a try. I feel confident enough to close this. Let me know if it turned out ok. 😉
Be sure to test using boxes 1.3.

kkew3 commented

Thanks! The latest version of boxes on brew is 1.2. I'll try it out when 1.3 is available.

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kkew3 commented

It works perfectly now. Thanks!

prompt> echo hello | boxes -s 70x
boxes: invalid box size specification -- 70x
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