How to store a command in a variable in a shell script?

Question

I would like to store a command to use at a later period in a variable (not the output of the command, but the command itself)

I have a simple script as follows:

Answer 1

I tried various different methods:

printexec() {
  printf -- "\033[1;37m$\033[0m"
  printf -- " %q" "$@"
  printf -- "\n"
  eval -- "$@"
  eval -- "$*"
  "$@"
  "$*"
}

Output:

$ printexec echo  -e "foo\n" bar
$ echo -e foo\\n bar
foon bar
foon bar
foo
 bar
bash: echo -e foo\n bar: command not found

As you can see, only the third one, "$@" gave the correct result.