Convenience functions for constructing shell commands.

Latest release 20260912.1: Fix project specification.

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 quoteargv() does.

Short summary:

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

• quote: Quote the supplied strings, return a list of the quoted strings.

• quoteargv: Quote strings, assemble into command string.

• quotestr: Quote a string for use on a shell command line.

Functions

main_shqstr(argv=None)

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

quote(args)

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

As of Python 3.8 the function shlex.join() probably does what you would have done with the result of this function i.e. join the resulting strings together.

quoteargv(argv)

Quote strings, assemble into command string.

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 20260912.1: Fix project specification.

Release 20260912: Rename quotecmd to quoteargv.

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