Preserving quotes in bash function parameters

Question

What I\'d like to do is take, as an input to a function, a line that may include quotes (single or double) and echo that line exactly as it was provided to the function. For

Answer 1

The shell is going to interpret the quotes and the $ before it passes it to your function. There's not a lot your function can do to get the special characters back, because it has no way of knowing (in the double-quote example) whether 42 was hard-coded or if it came from a variable. You will have to escape the special characters if you want them to survive long enough to make it to your function.