Doing your own parsing of the arguments is usually not a good idea. Is there a particular reason you want to loop over the arguments and collect them into a single string? If keeping quoting etc. intact is important, the "$@" construct is exactly for that, but then e.g. editing out some of the command-line arguments and passing on the rest is tricky. (Shifting off the first argument is of course always simple and straightforward.)

Hi era,

If i have something like ./example.sh does "this" work

If I echo "$@" then this outputs. does this work

i have tried using the shift but that's give the same problem because the $@ has already removed the quotes. Is there anyway of getting exactly what was inputted in from the above example without actually modifying the command parameter with escape characters.

Many thanks for your help