NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

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. Instead, do this:

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

This gives you just 1 file, hi there.

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 --`
    

debug shell scripts

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

    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.

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"
    

OPTIONS

--debug

Turn debugging on.

--help

Show the usage message and die.

--version

Show the version number and exit.

AVAILABILITY

AUTHOR