shellescape

Escapes a string so that it can be safely used in a Bourne shell command line. str can be a non-string object that responds to to_s.

Note that a resulted string should be used unquoted and is not intended for use in double quotes nor in single quotes.

argv = Shellwords.escape("It's better to give than to receive")
argv #=> "It\\'s\\ better\\ to\\ give\\ than\\ to\\ receive"

String#shellescape is a shorthand for this function.

argv = "It's better to give than to receive".shellescape
argv #=> "It\\'s\\ better\\ to\\ give\\ than\\ to\\ receive"

# Search files in lib for method definitions
pattern = "^[ \t]*def "
open("| grep -Ern #{pattern.shellescape} lib") { |grep|
  grep.each_line { |line|
    file, lineno, matched_line = line.split(':', 3)
    # ...
  }
}

It is the caller’s responsibility to encode the string in the right encoding for the shell environment where this string is used.

Multibyte characters are treated as multibyte characters, not as bytes.

Returns an empty quoted String if str has a length of zero.