[afurm]

Shellwords.split is documented to split "in the same way the UNIX Bourne shell does", but it doesn't handle a backslash-newline line continuation. The shell removes \<newline> both outside quotes and inside double quotes:

$ sh -c 'printf "[%s]" foo\
bar "x\
y"'
[foobar][xy]

Before:

Shellwords.split("foo\\\nbar")    # => ["foo\\\nbar"]
Shellwords.split("\"x\\\ny\"")    # => ["x\ny"]
Shellwords.split("foo \\\n bar")  # => ["foo", "\\\n", "bar"]

After:

Shellwords.split("foo\\\nbar")    # => ["foobar"]
Shellwords.split("\"x\\\ny\"")    # => ["xy"]
Shellwords.split("foo \\\n bar")  # => ["foo", "bar"]

A continuation on its own no longer produces a word, so "foo \\\n" gives ["foo"] and "\\\n" gives []. Single-quoted text and the escaped-newline output of shellescape ('\n') are unchanged, and I added tests for these cases.