A way to prevent bash from parsing command line w/out using escape symbols

Question

I\'m looking for a way (other than \".\", \'.\', \\.) to use bash (or any other linux shell) while preventing it from parsing parts of command line. The problem seems to be

Answer 1

Short answer: you can't do it, because the shell parses the command line (and interprets things like "&") before it even gets to the point of deciding your script/alias/whatever is what will be run, let alone the point where your script has any control at all. By the time your script has any influence in the process, it's far too late.

Within a script, though, it's easy to avoid most problems: wrap all variable references in double-quotes. For example, rather than curl -o $outputfile $url you should use curl -o "$outputfile" "$url". This will prevent the shell from applying any parsing to the contents of the variable(s) before they're passed to the command (/other script/whatever).

But when you run the script, you'll always have to quote or escape anything passed on the command line.