Ruby escape ARGV argument or string as argument to shell command

Ok this is driving me crazy:

`ls #{"/media/music/Miles Davis"}`

fails because of the space between "Miles" and "Davis"

Say I write a ruby script and a user passes file path as an argument. How do I escape it and feed to a shell-out command. Yes, yes, I know, shelling out should be avoided. But this is a contrived example, I still need this.

I would do system("ls", ARGV[0]), but it doesn't return the stdout output of ls as a string, which is what backticks do well.

How do escape whatever you insert in a shellout?