Problem with $DISPLAY

[Chris Jones]

Hi,

>> Any scripts that make any assumptions on what $DISPLAY looks like are
>> flawed by designed...
>
> I don't agree :
> (and not being an English fully-native speaker myself I won't comment about arguments with grammatical errors :P )
>
> http://www.xfree86.org/4.0/X.7.html#toc4
> http://www.x.org/archive/X11R6.8.0/doc/X.7.html#sect4
>
> {{{
> DISPLAY NAMES
>         From the user's perspective, every X server has a display name of the form:
>
>                                            hostname:displaynumber.screennumber
>
>         This information is used by the application to determine how it should connect to  the  server  and  which
>         screen it should use by default (on displays with multiple monitors):
>
> [...]
>         On POSIX systems, the default display name is stored in your DISPLAY environment variable.  This  variable
>         is set automatically by the xterm terminal emulator.  However, when you log into another machine on a net‐
>         work, you may need to set DISPLAY by hand to point to your display.  For example,
>
>             % setenv DISPLAY myws:0
>             $ DISPLAY=myws:0; export DISPLAY
> }}}
>
> If you have a reference to an RFC paper or similar stating different I am of course willing to modify my opinion accordingly.

My argument is not based on what some standard says about what DISPLAY 
should or should look like, but the basic premise that extracting 
information from $DISPLAY is just a bad idea and should be avoided.