Re: 'safe' printing to the terminal

* Michiel Beijen <[email protected]> [2026-05-09 14:51]:
> Is there a 'best practice' way to achieve something similar in Perl?

I don’t think so. I don’t know the entire CPAN off the top of my head,
obviously, but I’ve been around CPAN for a while and I don’t remember
ever coming across anything like that.

A probably-easily-90% fix is to just escape the escape character (0x1B),
but I have no guess for how much complexity is necessary to get to 100%.

> I know there used to be a discussion about this in gnu coreutils (ls
> and friends) and there is now quotearg.c which is MANY lines of code.

The place I’d be most inclined to look would be the source of the `less`
pager… but it’s not a pleasant codebase for finding or isolating that
logic. :-/  (It has a toggle for whether to pass escape sequences
through or escape them, which is stored in the `ctldisp` variable. You
can start with that symbol and lose your mind from there…)


* David Christensen <[email protected]> [2026-05-09 23:55]:
> https://metacpan.org/pod/String::ShellQuote
>
> I would advise testing what shell_quote() does when given control
> characters, ANSI escape sequences, Unicode, etc..

That is not really applicable. Maybe it happens to work for that purpose
by accident, but terminal control sequence escaping is a completely
different animal from shell metacharacter quoting.