Q:

Perl equivalent of PHP's escapeshellarg

To escape the string to be used as shell argument we use the function escapeshellarg() in PHP. Does Perl have an equivalent function ?

A:

String::ShellQuote, but most of the time this is not needed. You simply can avoid invoking the shell by careful programming. For example, system takes a list of arguments instead of a string.
Best practice:
use IPC::System::Simple qw(systemx);
systemx($command, @arguments);

require IPC::System::Simple;
use autodie qw(:all);
system([@allowed_exit_values], $command, @arguments);

A:

Perl can match the following stated function: 

adds single quotes around a string and quotes/escapes any existing single quotes
http://php.net/manual/en/function.escapeshellarg.php#function.escapeshellarg

like this: 
sub php_escapeshellarg { 
    my $str = @_ ? shift : $_;
    $str =~ s/((?:^|[^\\])(?:\\\\)*)'/$1'\\''/g;
    return "'$str'";
}

