I'd like to be able to mimic the way the Unix shell tokenizes a command line into what a Perl program sees as @ARGV. This little test program hopefully makes clear what I'd like to achieve: 

# Mimic the way the Unix shell breaks up cmdline into @ARGV.
# Before running this script, create a separate test script, g.pl, con
+sisting of:
#   for my $a (@ARGV) { print "a=:$a:\n" }

use strict;
use warnings;

### $qq matches a single or double quoted string.
my $qq = qr/'[^'\\]*(?:\\.[^'\\]*)*'|"[^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*"/;

my $cmd = qq{perl g.pl arg1 'arg 2' "arg 3" "arg \\"4" arg5};
print "cmd=:$cmd:\n\n";
my @args = $cmd =~ /$qq|\S+/g;
for my $t (@args) {
    if (substr($t, 0, 1) eq "'" || substr($t, 0, 1) eq '"') {
        $t = substr($t, 1, -1);
        $t =~ s/\\(['"])/$1/g;
    }
}
for my $a (@args) { print "a=:$a:\n" }
print "\n";
system($cmd);
print "\n";
system { $^X } @args;

[download]
Running this program shows that @args above matches what is seen as @ARGV in g.pl. However, this feels quite tricky and I've got that old re-inventing the wheel feeling. Is there a better way to do this?

In reply to Mimicking Unix shell quoting in Perl by eyepopslikeamosquito

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