Question

I’m looking for an equivalent function to Windows’ CommandLineToArgvW.

I have a string, which I want to break up exactly the way bash does it, with all the corner cases – i.e. taking into account single and double quotes, backslashes, etc., so splitting a b "c'd" "\"e\"f" "g\\" h 'i"j' would result into:

a
b
c'd
"e"f
g\
h
i"j

Since such a function already exist and is used by the OS/bash, I’m assuming there’s a way to call it, or at least get its source code, so I don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Edit

To answer why I need it, it has nothing to do with spawning child processes. I want to make a program that searches text, watching for multiple regular expressions to be true in whatever order. But all the regular expressions would be input in the same text field, so I need to break them up.

Answer 1

GNU/Linux is made of free software and bash is free software, so you can get the source code and improve it (and you should publish your improving patches under GPL license).

But there is no common library doing that, because it is the role of the shell to expand the command line to arguments to the execve(2) syscall (which then go to the main of the invoked program).

^{(this was different in MS-DOS, where the called program had to expand its command line)}

The function wordexp(3) is close to what you may want.

You may want to study the source code of simpler shells, e.g. download sash-3.7.tar.gz