YSH addresses the "string safety" problem:

What is YSH? https://oils.pub/ysh.html

I am writing a quoting module now, but the key point is that it's a powerful enough language to do so. It is more like Python or JS; you don't have to resort to sed to parse and quote strings.

I posted the quote-argv solution above -- in YSH it will likely be:

    var argv = :| ls 'arg with space' |   # like bash argv=()
    ssh example.com $[quote.sh(argv)]

But you can write such a function NOW if you like

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quote.sh follows the (subtle) idiom of replacing a single quote ' with

    '\''
 

which means it works on systems with remote POSIX sh, not just YSH !

e.g. "isn't" in POSIX shell is quoted as

    'isn'\''t'

which is these three word parts:

    'isn' \' 't'

YSH also has:

- JSON, which can correctly round trip every Unicode string, without writing your own parsing functions

- JSON8, an optional extension that can round trip every byte string you get from the Unix kernel

https://oils.pub/release/latest/doc/j8-notation.html