Hi, for security reasons I am trying to switch the execution of other commands from backticks to the list-form of open.

Before: 

$result = `$cmd $args`;

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After: 
open ($fh, '-|', $cmd_file, @args);
$test_result = <$fh>;

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As you might have noticed, the latter form needs the arguments splitted up into a list, the former one just a plain string. For simple arguments of course 'split' will do the trick. But what about arguments that contain white space? If $args is something like 
-w 70 -c 80 -r 'bla bla'

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a simple split at whitespace would certainly produce a wrong argument list. Now the shell could of course do this, but the point of removing the backticks was to get rid of the shell in the first place.

So my question: How can I split up a string into an argument list just as the shell would do it? Including escape characters like ' " \ ...

Thanks,

Christopher

In reply to Switching from backticks to open by Eule

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