ShellQuote

Section: User Contributed Perl Documentation (3)
Updated: 2010-06-11
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NAME

String::ShellQuote - quote strings for passing through the shell

SYNOPSIS

    $string = shell_quote @list;
    $string = shell_quote_best_effort @list;
    $string = shell_comment_quote $string;

DESCRIPTION

This module contains some functions which are useful for quoting strings which are going to pass through the shell or a shell-like object.

shell_quote [string]...: shell_quote quotes strings so they can be passed through the shell. Each string is quoted so that the shell will pass it along as a single argument and without further interpretation. If no strings are given an empty string is returned.
If any string can't be safely quoted shell_quote will croak.
shell_quote_best_effort [string]...: This is like shell_quote, excpet if the string can't be safely quoted it does the best it can and returns the result, instead of dying.
shell_comment_quote [string]: shell_comment_quote quotes the string so that it can safely be included in a shell-style comment (the current algorithm is that a sharp character is placed after any newlines in the string).
This routine might be changed to accept multiple string arguments in the future. I haven't done this yet because I'm not sure if the strings should be joined with blanks ($") or nothing ($,). Cast your vote today! Be sure to justify your answer.

EXAMPLES

    $cmd = 'fuser 2>/dev/null ' . shell_quote @files;
    @pids = split ' ', `$cmd`;

    print CFG "# Configured by: ",
                shell_comment_quote($ENV{LOGNAME}), "\n";

BUGS

Only Bourne shell quoting is supported. I'd like to add other shells (particularly cmd.exe), but I'm not familiar with them. It would be a big help if somebody supplied the details.

AUTHOR

Roderick Schertler <roderick@argon.org>