How to preserve double quotes in $@ in a shell script?

Question

Let\'s say I have a really simple shell script \'foo\':

  #!/bin/sh
  echo $@

If I invoke it like so:

  foo 1 2 3
         


        

Answer 1

You need to quote the quotes:

foo 1 "\"this arg has whitespace\"" 3

or (more simply)

foo 1 '"this arg has whitespace"' 3

You need to quote the double quotes to make sure that the shell doesn't remove them when parsing word arguments.