That still doesn't explain the purpose behind this odd goal, which is what I was wondering, because there may be more straightforward ways to do it than the design you've chosen.

In sh, you can try eval "$cmd" to force it to re-evaluate the line again after the first expansion, which will indeed interpret the literal quotes as a string parameter.

This is dangerous however, because eval accepts all valid shell syntax, including backticks and variables. Someone could feed it a tailored string to extract variables from your program or run whatever commands they wanted.

Because of this you may wish to make the string into

Code:

CMD="./anotherscript.sh -c \"\$COMMENT\""

to prevent $COMMENT from being expanded. eval will expand it for you, but won't interpret its contents as anything other than string. I don't think this is possible in C shell, only sh.