realpath quoting

[jeremy ardley]

I have a need  to get the full path of a file that has spaces in its 
name to use as a program argument

e.g.
jeremy@client:~$ ls -l name\ with\ spaces
-rw-r--r-- 1 jeremy jeremy 0 May  3 06:51 'name with spaces'
jeremy@client:~$ realpath name\ with\ spaces
/home/jeremy/name with spaces


The spaces without quotes cause problems with subsequent processing.

Can realpath or other utility return a quoted pathname?