Question

I want to create a variable which is essentially a list of arguments to pass to a command or function. The pattern below with arg_string works well for foo, bar, and baz, but not for “multi word token”, which I would like the command to see as a single argument.

#!/bin/bash
function func() {
  for arg in "$@"
  do
    echo ${arg}
  done
}

arg_string="foo bar baz \"multi word token\""
arg_string="foo bar baz multi\ word\ token"
arg_string="foo bar baz 'multi word token'"
func ${arg_string}

Here is the output:

foo
bar
baz
'multi
word
token'

When I want:

foo
bar
baz
multi word token

Answer 1

Just stick an eval before the function call:

 eval func ${arg_string}