Bug #18896: Shellwords.escape(nil) returns "empty" string

• Status: Rejected
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -
• ruby -v: ruby 3.1.2p20 (2022-04-12 revision 4491bb740a) [powerpc-aix7.1.0]
• Backport: 2.7: UNKNOWN, 3.0: UNKNOWN, 3.1: UNKNOWN

[hspem (Per-Erik Martin)]

Mistakenly calling Shellwords.escape with nil as parameter had this result:

irb(main):002:0> Shellwords.escape(nil)
=> "''"

This is not helpful and resulted a hard-to-find bug when a script proceeded to use an empty string where it shouldn't be possible. nil is not a string and escape should raise an exception instead.
Shellwords version:

# gem list shellwords

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

shellwords (default: 0.1.0)
# 

[Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme)]

Shellwords.escape just converts the argument to a string before shell-escaping it, so in this context nil is equivalent to ""

Shellwords.escape("")         #=> "''"
Shellwords.escape(42)         #=> "42"
Shellwords.escape(Object.new) #=> "\\#\\<Object:0x00007f01ae28c3a8\\>"

At this point, changing the API in such a backward-incompatible way would cause more problems than benefit.

[jeremyevans0 (Jeremy Evans)]

• Status changed from Open to Rejected