Shell quoting as part of the standard library?

[David M. Wilson]

Oren Tirosh <oren-py-l at hishome.net> wrote...

> The best solution is often to bypass the shell (os.system) and execute 
> the external command you want directly with os.spawnv. In this case the 
> arguments are passed as a list of strings rather than a space-separated
> string and therefore need no quoting.

That would be a fine solution, except again it does not solve my
problem. In the latest application of shell quoting, I needed to
insert filenames into a shell excerpt provided by a user who is
knowledgeable in shell.

They could write, for instance:

   process_app %(input_filename) || something %(blah)
   [ -s %(output_filename) ] && ...


But it would be above them to express that in Python, so bypassing the
shell is not an option. Thanks,


David.