[erlang-questions] JCL mode remote shell start annoyance

[Kenneth Lakin]

I've been playing around with distributed Erlang and remote shells today.

For a few minutes, I was somewhat convinced that remote shells *only*
worked with nodes started with the -sname flag. Playing around with
net_adm:ping/1 reminded me that node names are atoms, and I should
*probably* enclose a node name that contains '.' in single quotes. Lo
and behold, this made the JCL mode 'r' command happy.

Would it break anything to make the JCL mode 'r' command wrap the
provided remote node name in single quotes if it hasn't already been
wrapped by the user? If this isn't feasible, could the error message be
changed from "Unknown command" to something more descriptive? (Maybe
something like "Error. Try single quotes around node name."?)

For clarity, a transcript of my shell conversation follows:

$ ERL_EPMD_ADDRESS="127.0.0.1" erl -name observer -hidden
Erlang/OTP 18 [erts-7.0] [source] [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [async-threads:10]
[hipe] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V7.0  (abort with ^G)
(observer@REDACTED)1>
User switch command
 --> r remote-node@REDACTED
Unknown command
 --> j
   1* {shell,start,[init]}
 --> r 'remote-node@REDACTED'
 --> j
   1  {shell,start,[init]}
   2* {'remote-node@REDACTED',shell,start,[]}
 --> q
$

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