escaping characters in filenames

[J Kenneth King]

I wrote a script to process some files using another program.  One thing
I noticed was that both os.listdir() and os.path.walk() will return
unescaped file names (ie: "My File With Spaces & Stuff" instead of "My\
File\ With\ Spaces\ \&\ Stuff").  I haven't had much success finding a
module or recipe that escapes file names and was wondering if anyone
could point me in the right direction.

As an aside, the script is using subprocess.call() with the "shell=True"
parameter.  There isn't really a reason for doing it this way (was just
the fastest way to write it and get a prototype working).  I was
wondering if Popen objects were sensitive to unescaped names like the
shell.  I intend to refactor the function to use Popen objects at some
point and thought perhaps escaping file names may not be entirely
necessary.

Cheers