Hi Monks!
My Perl utility generates a bash script that consists of mkdir/rsync/cp commands.
This bash script is later used by users (this means that I don't want to actually run those commands when my utility runs, rather just to generate the script).
Given a UNIX path, I need to do two different actions - depending on the path type (dir or file):
1. If the path is a directory, then just create it using mkdir.
2. If the path is a file, then just copy the file from the dir directory using rsync or cp (depending if user specified a machine to copy from).
For example, consider this:

touch /a/b/c/d1
[download]

In that case, the bash script will look like:

mkdir -p /tmp/a/b/c
cp /a/b/c/d1 /tmp/a/b/c
# Or: rsync -a $USER@MACHINE:/a/b/c/d1 /tmp/a/b/c
[download]

The utility works good, unless a path contains "special chars".
I tried to deal with it by escaping and using quotes but I can't seem to cover all cases.
By "special chars" I mean chars like ":",";","(",")","_",....
I tried to use the following to subs:

sub escape {         
    my ($path) = @_;                        
    if ($path =~ /\\/) {                    
        $path =~ s/\\/\\\\/g;               
    }
    if ($path =~ /\$/) {
        $path =~ s/\$/\\\$/g;
    }
    return $path;
}

sub wrap_with_quotes {
    my ($path) = @_;
    if ($path =~ /( |\;|\!)/) {
        return '"'.$path.'"';
    }
    return $path;
}
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I also tried to use quotemeta:

sub escape {         
    my ($path) = @_;                        
    my $new_path = quotemeta($path);
    $new_path =~ s/\\\//\//g;
    return $new_path;
}
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But it also failed for a lot of cases and it escaped alot of unneeded chars (like ".", "/", etc. - which are valid in paths without escaping).
The code looks like:

foreach my $dir (sort(keys(%dirs))) {
    $dir = escape($dir);
    $dir = wrap_with_quotes($dir);
    print("mkdir -p /tmp/$dir\n");
}

foreach my $file (sort(keys(%files))) {
    my $parent_dir = dirname($file);
    my $abs_path = abs_path($file);
    $abs_path = escape($abs_path);
    $abs_path = wrap_with_quotes($abs_path);
    $parent_dir = escape($parent_dir);
    $parent_dir = wrap_with_quotes($parent_dir);
    print("cp $abs_path /tmp/$parent_dir\n");
}

foreach my $file (sort(keys(%remote_files))) {
    my $parent_dir = dirname($file);
    my $abs_path = abs_path($file);
    my $host = get_host();
    $abs_path = escape($abs_path);
    $abs_path = wrap_with_quotes($abs_path);
    $parent_dir = escape($parent_dir);
    $parent_dir = wrap_with_quotes($parent_dir);
    print("rsync -a $host$abs_path /tmp/$parent_dir\n");
}
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I of course want to support any kind of path. For example, the special char could contain a "\" before it, and then I need to escape both of them. I built a small test for you to understand what I'm after:

declare -a special_chars=("!" "@" "#" "$" "%" "^" "_" "-" "=" "+" "[" 
+"]" "(" ")" "{" "}" "'" ":" "," "." ";" " " "\"" "<" ">")

if [ "$1" == 1 ]; then # create playground (before running the bash sc
+ript)
    for special_char in "${special_chars[@]}"; do
        mkdir -p "/test1/a${special_char}b"
        touch "/test1/a${special_char}b/data"
    done
else # test playground output (after running the bash script)
    for special_char in "${special_chars[@]}"; do
        mkdir -p "/tmp/test1/a${special_char}b"
        if [ "$?" -ne 0 ]; then
            exit 1
        fi
    done
fi
[download]

If 1 is passed to the script, it will generate directory with one special char (for example: test1/a;b).
Then I run the generated bash script and then the test script again - if 0 is passed, it will check if the bash script successfully created dirs & copied files into /tmp.
Hope it makes sense.
I also noticed that rsync and cp except different escaping. For example, "/test1/a;b/data" works for cp and "/test1/a\;b/data" works for rsync.
Is there an easy way to handle special chars in path? All I want is to create mkdir/cp/rsync commands in a bash script that so they will later work.
Please help me to fix the wrap_with_quotes and escape subs or find a better way.

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