Convenience functions for constructing shell commands

Latest release 20210316: Minor doc update.

Functions for safely constructing shell command lines from bare strings. Somewhat like the inverse of the shlex stdlib module.

As of Python 3.3 the function shlex.quote() does what quotestr() does.

As of Python 3.8 the function shlex.join() does what quotecmd() does.

Function main_shqstr(argv=None)

shqstr: emit shell-quoted form of the command line arguments.

Function quote(args)

Quote the supplied strings, return a list of the quoted strings.

As of Python 3.8 the function shlex.join() is available for this.

Function quotecmd(argv)

Quote strings, assemble into command string.

Function quotestr(s)

Quote a string for use on a shell command line.

As of Python 3.3 the function shlex.quote() is available for this.

Release Log

Release 20210316: Minor doc update.

Release 20180613: Rework quotestr significantly to provide somewhat friendlier quoting, include "," in the SAFECHARS.

Release 20170903.2: bugfix main boilerplate after setuptools workaround

Release 20170903.1: workaround setuptool's slightly dumb console_scripts call of a "main" function

Release 20170903: shqstr command; new quotecmd(argv) function

Release 20150118: Extend SAFECHARS to include colon.

Release 20150111: minor cleanup

Release 20150107: initial standalone public release