Re: Feature Request: Function to quote filenames

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: raman <raman@google.com>
> Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2015 08:26:52 -0700
> 
> Motivated by the  increasing number of filenames that show up with spc,
> "'"  and other punctuation characters in their name.
> 
> The only helper function Emacs provides today is shell-quote-argument --
> which often doesn't do the trick.
> 
> As an example: Given the filename:
> 
> Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
> 
> (setq f (shell-quote-argument "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"))
> returns 
> "Alice\\'s\\ Adventures\\ in\\ Wonderland"
> 
>  But invocations like 
> (shell-command (format "ls %s" f))
> 
>  throw an error 

It does?  What error?  I see no error, just a return value meaning
there's no such file.

> it's never obvious what quoting magic to  use to get all the cases
> right.
> 
> Would be nice if we had a shell-quote-filename elisp function that did
> all of the magic quoting.

The magic, if there is one, depends on the application, because only
the application knows the semantics of the file-name argument for the
program to be invoked.  So I don't see how a general-purpose utility
function could solve the problem.  Unless I misunderstand the problem
you have.