Forming sanitary shell commands or system calls in Ruby

Question

I\'m building a daemon that will help me manage my server(s). Webmin works fine, as does just opening a shell to the server, but I\'d prefer to be able to control server ope

Answer 1

I'd suggest looking into the 'shellwords' module. This script:

require 'shellwords'
parts = ['echo', "'hello world'; !%& some stuff", 'and another argument']
command = Shellwords.shelljoin( parts )
puts command
output = `#{ command }`
puts output

outputs the escaped text and the expected output:

echo \'hello\ world\'\;\ \!\%\&\ some\ stuff and\ another\ argument
'hello world'; !%& some stuff and another argument