in reply to Splitting up quoted/escaped command line arguments
This is just a series of simple splits and/or regexen.
This probably isn't as easy as you think it is. There are already more than one way to make your code "fall on its face".
If the path to the program the user wants to call has spaces, you'll end up breaking it in two, whether the user added quotes or backslashes where needed. But maybe the users are supposed to run a list of carefully chosen programs.
If an argument is "the 'simple' solution", it will be broken into ('simple', 'the solution').
Even if you checked that a " wasn't preceded by a backslash correctly (you wrote [^\]*", which should be a syntax error because the \ has to be escaped, and * means that the " may or may not be preceded by something else than a backslash), it would failed with something like "\\".
So if you find one, do use a module that does the job for you, but I'm afraid I don't know any, and as far as I looked, argv did not seem to be what you are looking for. I may be wrong on that point.