SHELL-QUOTE(1)

💅 SHELL-QUOTE(1) 💅

hiiii bestie 🫶 welcome to the User Contributed Perl Documentation corner for shell-quote. This is the manual page, but make it make sense in the group chat. We're keeping all the real stuff exactly real, okay? No cap.

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✨ NAME ✨

shell-quote — quote arguments for safe use, unmodified in a shell command. periodt. 💖

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

shell-quote [switch]... arg...

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so shell-quote lets you pass arbitrary strings through the shell so that they won't be changed by the shell. iconic behavior. This lets you process commands or files with embedded white space or shell globbing characters safely. Here are a few examples.

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🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

🚀 ssh preserving args

When running a remote command with ssh, ssh doesn't preserve the separate arguments it receives. It just joins them with spaces and passes them to "$SHELL -c". This doesn't work as intended:

ssh host touch 'hi there'           # fails

It creates 2 files, hi and there. not the vibe. Instead, do this:

cmd=`shell-quote touch 'hi there'`
ssh host "$cmd"

This gives you just 1 file, hi there. slay. 🌈

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🔍 process find output

It's not ordinarily possible to process an arbitrary list of files output by find with a shell script. Anything you put in $IFS to split up the output could legitimately be in a file's name. Here's how you can do it using shell-quote:

eval set -- `find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 shell-quote --`

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🐞 debug shell scripts

shell-quote is better than echo for debugging shell scripts. iykyk. ✨

debug() {
    [ -z "$debug" ] || shell-quote "debug:" "$@"
}

With echo you can't tell the difference between debug 'foo bar' and debug foo bar, but with shell-quote you can.

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🗂️ save a command for later

shell-quote can be used to build up a shell command to run later. Say you want the user to be able to give you switches for a command you're going to run. If you don't want the switches to be re-evaluated by the shell (which is usually a good idea, else there are things the user can't pass through), you can do something like this:

user_switches=
while [ $# != 0 ]
do
    case x$1 in
        x--pass-through)
            [ $# -gt 1 ] || die "need an argument for $1"
            user_switches="$user_switches "`shell-quote -- "$2"`
            shift;;
        # process other switches
    esac
    shift
done
# later
eval "shell-quote some-command $user_switches my args"

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⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

• --debug — turns debugging on. very detective era. 🕵️
• --help — shows the usage message and dies. dramatic exit, honestly. 💀
• --version — shows the version number and exits. short, sweet, bye. 👑

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🌈 AVAILABILITY 🌈

The code is licensed under the GNU GPL. Check http://www.argon.org/~roderick/ or CPAN for updated versions.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Roderick Schertler <roderick@argon.org> — author icon behavior. 🫶

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okay that's the whole page, bestie 💖 it came from perl v5.42.0, dated 2018-01-19, and it lives under SHELL-QUOTE(1). mwah, go quote something safely 🎀