Shell escaping is the process of protecting special characters in a string so that they are treated as literal characters by the shell, rather than as syntax or commands. In Javascript, shell escaping is typically used when working with commands that are executed in a terminal or shell environment. This is because special characters like <, >, &, and | have special meanings in the shell, and can cause unexpected behavior if not properly escaped. To shell escape a string in JavaScript, you can use the shellEscape function from the shelljs library, which is a popular library for working with shell commands in JavaScript. Here's an example: const shellEscape = require('shelljs').escape; const myString = 'This is a <script>alert("hello")</script>'; const escapedString = shellEscape(myString); console.log(escapedString); // Output: This is a \[script\]alert\("hello")\[/script\]