Thanks. Indeed it should work, and it nearly does... but it fails on one of the tests (foo\ , with an extra space at the end of the name, which is mildly annoying as I do have files that end with spaces (before anybody mentions it: no I can't change that ;--). If I quote them it works OK though (.

It might be a bug in the module and worth fixing though.

Yes, it's a bug. This is the offending part:

sub shellwords {
    local(@lines) = @_;
    $lines[$#lines] =~ s/\s+$//;
    return(quotewords('\s+', 0, @lines));
}
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The bug is the unrestricted deletion of trailing whitespace - it shouldn't delete whitespace that's preceeded by the right number of backslashes. I'll see if I can come up with a patch later tonight.

Note that that's not the only case where Text::ParseWords and my shell (bash) disagrees. Given the string "foo\'bar", my shell parses that as foo\'bar, while Text::ParseWords turns it into foo'bar.

Abigail

Yes, I saw that, here is my fix:

    $lines[$#lines] =~ s{(\\.)?\s*$}{defined $1 ? $1 : ''}e;

I don't really like it but it passes my tests.:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict; 

use Test::More qw(no_plan);

while( <DATA>)
  { my( $input, $expected)= m{^'(.*?)'\s*=>\s*'(.*?)'};
    (my $trimmed= $input)=~ s{(\\.)?\s*$}{defined $1 ? $1 : ''}e;
    is( $trimmed, $expected, "'$input'");
  }

__DATA__
't'    =>'t' 
't  '  =>'t'
't\ '  =>'t\ '
't\  ' =>'t\ '
't\ \ '=>'t\ \ '
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bash, sh, csh and tcsh all give foo\'bar. This one looks more of a pain to fix.

Are there tests for Text::ParseWords somewhere? The CPAN version has nothing, which makes it quite dangerous to work on it.