Shellwords(3)

💖 Shellwords(3) — aka Text::Shellwords 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this one is a vibe and also kind of a ghost 👻

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

use Text::Shellwords;
@words = shellwords($line);
@words = shellwords(@lines);

like. that's the whole API. that's it. she's small. she's compact. she's giving minimalism 🎀

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so real talk first: this module used to be a wrapper around shellwords.pl, but it has now been superseded by Text::ParseWords. use that module insteade (yes bestie, that's the original spelling, we're keeping the lore 💅). if you use this module anyway, it will simply report the shellwords() function from Text::ParseWords.

now, the old description follows, because we keep receipts:

this is a thin wrapper around the shellwords.pl package, which comes preinstalled with Perl. this module imports a single subroutine, shellwords(). the shellwords() routine parses lines of text and returns a set of tokens using the same rules that the Unix shell does for its command-line arguments. tokens are separated by whitespace, and can be delimited by single or double quotes. the module also respects backslash escapes. 🦋✨

if called with one or more arguments, shellwords() will treat each argument as a line of text, parse it, and return the tokens.

⚠️ note that the old behavior of parsing $_ if no arguments are provided is no longer supported. sorry. 😭 that's literally what it says. sorry.

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🫶 BUGS 🫶

please report them. (that's it. that's the whole section. she's lowkey a woman of few words and honestly? iconic.)

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• shellwords.pl

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

Lincoln Stein <lstein@cshl.org>.

Copyright (c) 2001 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. See DISCLAIMER.txt for disclaimers of warranty.

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and that's the tea, bestie 🍓 this was perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-25, and it lives in section 3 of the manual as Shellwords(3) — mwah, take care of her, she's retired but she's still cute 🧚💖