What exactly is allowed in the PAGER variable?

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

reassign 36619 debian-policy
retitle 36619 What exactly is allowed in the PAGER variable?
thanks

I received this bug against wdiff:

On 24 Apr 1999, Charles C. Fu wrote:

> wdiff dies with an exit code of 2 if $PAGER is an executable with
> arguments (e.g., "less -c").  This bug can be fixed simply by using
> popen instead of wdiff's writepipe function as shown in the attached
> patch.
> 
> Using popen means that a shell will be invoked which will parse any
> metacharacters (e.g., consider the PAGER string "sleep 500& less -c").
> Such handling is consistent with the behavior of Debian programs
> including zmore and /usr/bin/man and is somewhat consistent with the
> program /usr/bin/mail (which has a custom globbing routine that
> interprets a limited set of metacharacters).
> 
> Since the PAGER environment variable is used by many packages and is
> currently parsed at least three different ways, perhaps Debian policy
> should state what is allowed in $PAGER.

I agree with him that policy should clearly state what exactly is allowed
in the PAGER variable, so after applying the patch (since it seems useful
anyway), I'm reassigning this bug to debian-policy.

Thanks.

-- 
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