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The echo nukes your quotes so you can't run the precise output of the echo, but yeah, if I'm doing weird shit with variables in a command I do that.

Another tip for anyone who runs history commands like `!!` or `rm !$` is the :p operator, which just prints what the shell would have executed and adds the full command into your history so you can hit ^ enter.

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In case it wasn't clear: I'd do the echo run first to validate roughly what commands I would be running (minus some escaping gotchas that you raise), and then another run without the echo.

The echo trick is mostly a suggestion of a very quick trick, but it fails in a large number of cases (even something as simple as piping that command through another).

Thanks for the pointer to :p too!

It's a little bit longer, but bash/zsh support `printf '%q ' <args...>`, which produces output where any characters that may be interpreted by the shell will be escaped.

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