I'm trying to use shlex.split to simulate what would happen in the shell. The docs say that it should be as close as possible to the posix shell parsing rules.
If you type the following into a posix compliant shell echo '\?foo' you get back: \?foo (I've tested this in dash, bash and zsh---all give the same results.) Now here's what happens in python: Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Mar 7 2008, 03:39:23) [GCC 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import shlex >>> shlex.split("'\?foo'") ['\\?foo'] >>> I think this is a bug? Or am I just misunderstanding? Here is the relevant section of the Posix specification on shell parsing: 2.2.2 Single-Quotes Enclosing characters in single-quotes ( '' ) shall preserve the literal value of each character within the single-quotes. A single- quote cannot occur within single-quotes. That's from http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_03 Thanks for any help! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list