This is a thin wrapper around the shellwords.pl package, which comes preinstalled with Perl. This module imports a single subroutine, shellwords(). The shellwords() routine parses lines of text and returns a set of tokens using the same rules that the Unix shell does for its command-line arguments. Tokens are separated by whitespace, and can be delimited by single or double quotes. The module also respects backslash escapes. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-Shellwords/