man.postnix Miscellaneous man pages of Plan 9 related material

     PARSECMD(10.2)                                     PARSECMD(10.2)

     NAME
          parsecmd - parse device commands

     SYNOPSIS
          Cmdbuf* parsecmd(char *a, int n)

     DESCRIPTION
          Parsecmd is an interface to tokenize (see getfields(10.2)),
          that safely parses a command, with blank-separated fields,
          as might be written to a device's ctl file.  The buffer a
          and count n can be those passed to the driver's write func-
          tion.  Parsecmd converts the byte array (which might not be
          null-terminated) to a null-terminated string, trimming any
          trailing new line, before invoking tokenize to break the
          string into arguments, interpreting blank and tab as field
          separators when they are not quoted (in the style of sh(1)).
          It returns a pointer to a dynamically-allocated Cmdbuf
          structure, which holds a copy of the string as modified by
          parsefields, and the resulting fields; it is defined as fol-
          lows:

               typedef
               struct Cmdbuf
               {
                     char  buf[128];
                     char  *f[16];
                     int   nf;
               } Cmdbuf;

          The array f holds the field pointers; nf gives the number of
          fields.  Cmdbuf is allocated by smalloc (see malloc(10.2)),
          and the caller is responsible for freeing it using free.

     SOURCE
          /os/port/parse.c
          /emu/port/dev.c

     Page 1                       Plan 9            (printed 12/19/25)