Pass parameters that contain whitespaces via shell variable

Question

I\'ve got a program that I want to call by passing parameters from a shell variable. Throughout this question, I am going to assume that it is given by

#!/bin/sh         


        

Answer 1

This can be solved with xargs. By replacing

count-args $X

with

echo $X | xargs count-args

I can use backslashes to escape whitespaces in $X, e.g.

X="Hello\\ World"
echo $X | xargs count-args

prints out 1 and

X="Hello World"
echo $X | xargs count-args

prints out 2.