Bash tokenizing quoted string with spaces as individual words

Question

I\'m trying to execute the following commands:

mkdir \'my dir\'
CMD=\"ls \'my dir\'\"
RESULT=$($CMD)

This results in:

ls: \'my:         


        

Answer 1

To provide another approach -- one that works on POSIX systems -- xargs can do this parsing for you, as long as you can guarantee that the argument list is short enough that it doesn't get split into multiple separate commands:

CMD="ls 'my dir'"
printf '%s\n' "$CMD" | xargs sh -c '"$@"' sh