How to escape strings for terminal in Ruby?

Question

I am attempting to start mplayer. My filename contains spaces and these should be escaped. This is the code I am using:

@player_pid = fork do
   exec \"/usr         


        

Answer 1

Shellwords should work for you :)

exec "/usr/bin/mplayer %s" % Shellwords.escape(song.file)

---

In ruby 1.9.x, it looks like you have to require it first

require "shellwords"

But in ruby 2.0.x, I didn't have to explicitly require it.