I've run into this issue when I wrote an rsync script, in which I had to eval the command to get things to work properly, as in:

Code:

eval $RSYNC $rsync_param $SRC_DIR $USER@$TRG_SRV:$TRG_DIR >> $LOG_FILE

To demonstrate what is happening, I created a quick script to display the number of parameters, and the parameters themselves:

Code:

#! /bin/sh

echo '#:' ${#}
while [[ 0 -lt ${#} ]]; do echo "${1}"; shift; done | cat -n

And here are the results:

Code:

trogdor $ ./countem a b c d
#: 4
     1    a
     2    b
     3    c
     4    d

trogdor $ ./countem a 'b c' d
#: 3
     1    a
     2    b c
     3    d

Which is as expected. But if we:

Code:

trogdor $ ARGS="a 'b c' d"

trogdor $ ./countem ${ARGS}
#: 4
     1    a
     2    'b
     3    c'
     4    d

${ARGS} is expanded into four tokens. Double-quoting doesn't help either:

Code:

trogdor $ ./countem "${ARGS}"
 #: 1
     1    a 'b c' d

What you need to do is have the shell re-parse your command line, so that it is recognizes the quoting within your variables:

Code:

trogdor $ eval ./countem "${ARGS}"
  #: 3
     1    a
     2    b c
     3    d

Or without the quotes:

Code:

trogdor $ eval ./countem ${ARGS}
#: 3
     1    a
     2    b c
     3    d

Be warned, the script will evaluate the command line twice. Be careful with characters that will cause command line expansion.