shooting in the foot with caret ^ on windows

[anatoly techtonik]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 12:25 PM, Simon King <simon at simonking.org.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 3:53 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 2:10 AM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2014-07-20 at 13:53 +0300, anatoly techtonik wrote:
>>>> C:\discovery>hg log -r tip^ --style compact
>>>> 108   6dab298d9851   2014-05-16 21:40 +0300   techtonik
>>>>   graphics/pysdl2/demofire.py: 1.5 - Fire Plane (not optimized)
>>> ...
>>>> It would be nice to mention this on
>>>> http://www.selenic.com/hg/help/revsets and link to
>>>> cross-platform alternative.
>>>
>>> Docs: sure, send a patch.
>>
>> Is there online editor somewhere?
>>
>>> As for a shell-safe alternative, the following symbols aren't suitable:
>>>
>>> `~!@#$%&*()_-+=\|:;'"<>,./?
>>>
>>> ..because they're either used by a common shell and/or revsets already.
>>> As that's every single other symbol on a US keyboard, I'm going to have
>>> to deny your request.
>>
>> Isn't something like parents(tip)[3] is an safe alternative to tip^3 ?
>
> (aside: tip^3 doesn't make sense - a changeset can have at most 2 parents)
>
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by safe. That wouldn't work in bash:
>
>   $: hg log -r parents(tip)
>   -bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

On Windows this is ok. But it is not clear how to choose second parent.

> It's also much longer to type than just putting quotes around the caret version:
>
>   hg log -r "tip^2"

To much surprise, quoting works, but you need to know about that.

Looks like there is no convenient solution possible. It will be either
Windows-only
or Linux-only. Is there a pattern name for such cases?
-- 
anatoly t.