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

Please never use the "single command line" form of exec, that leaves you open to all the usual quoting and injection issues and pointlessly launches a shell. From the fine manual:

exec(cmdname, arg1, ...)

command name and one or more arguments (no shell)

So instead of mucking around with quoting and escaping and what not, just use the shell-less version:

exec '/usr/bin/mplayer', song.file

and bypass the shell completely. Similarly for system.