From: Kevin Ballard <kballard@...>
Date: 2005-10-18T22:51:57+09:00
Subject: Re: inner string to path

See above about the multi-argument form, but if you want to stick with
single-argument, you can do something like

  foo = `ls \'#{str.gsub("'", "\\'")}\'`

That keeps an internal single-quote from terminating the string.

Alternately, you could do something lik

  foo = `ls #{str.gsub(/[" ']/, '\\\\\0')

That escapes spaces and quotes. And if you have LANG (or LC_CTYPE) set
to the right encoding (probably en_US.UTF-8) then the accented
characters will work fine as well.

Note: I needed 5 backslashes in that single-quoted string because of
how gsub works. The string itself evaluates to \\\0, which gsub then
turns into \ followed by the matched string. Not very intuitive, how
gsub compresses backslashes, but I can understand why it does that.