[GRASS-dev] Parser checking output maps but not input maps

[Glynn Clements]

Vaclav Petras wrote:

> > For scripts which use g.parser for argument parsing, if G_parser()
> > fails g.parser itself fails, which in turn causes the script to fail.
> >
> > Python scripts should normally terminate on an exception if a spawned
> > command fails, whereas shell scripts normally ignore the status of any
> > spanwed commands.
> 
> For Python this is ensured by checking "@ARGS_PARSED@" in g.parser output
> in grass.script.core.parse() [1]. For Bash I have no idea how it is/was
> done (e.g. in version 6).

bash scripts "exec" g.parser in the current process, in place of bash. 
g.parser then re-executes the calling script with the option values
stored in environment variables. If g.parser fails, the script never
gets re-executed, and the exit status of g.parser is the exit status
of the process which was originally running the script.

> However, my problem is that in C if you have an input map, you don't have
> to check that whether it exists. While in Python you have to check if it
> exists otherwise the first module (subprocess) you call with it will
> unexpectedly fail. I hit this issue when I was trying to write
> documentation for writing scripts and I wanted to do it the right way (as
> opposed to hopping that some random script I pick in the source code
> follows well the undocumented API).
> 
> The question now is if we want to fix the inconsistency in between writing
> C and Python (and error reporting with overwrite). Or if we say that the
> current state is good enough as long as it is documented and there is some
> convenient function to check existence of a map. I don't think I exhausted
> all options, so if somebody has an idea or is willing to implement
> something, that would be great.

If you consider GRASS modules as being the Python equivalent of GRASS
API functions in C, then there isn't an inconsistency. Rather than
explicitly checking for a map, we rely upon whatever tries to use
generating a fatal error if it doesn't exist.

If you want to directly check for the existence of a map, use
grass.script.find_file() (a wrapper around g.findfile, which in turn
is a wrapper around G_find_file2(), which is what C code would use for
that purpose).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>