There's a function quotemeta:

To quote from the doco:

Returns the value of EXPR with all non-alphanumeric characters backslashed. (That is, all characters not matching /A-Za-z_0-9/ will be preceded by a backslash in the returned string, regardless of any locale settings.) This is the internal function implementing the \Q escape in double-quoted strings.
Update:

In reply to Re: quoting for system() and friends by snoopy
in thread quoting for system() and friends by pileofrogs

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