What cb321 said. Sometimes programs take a single argument that contains the whole command. @Q allows to safely escape the list of arguments. This is a syntheti

What cb321 said. Sometimes programs take a single argument that contains the whole command. @Q allows to safely escape the list of arguments. This is a synthetic example: args=("my" "arg" "with space") bash -c "rm ${args[*]@Q}" This makes sure that the script will `rm` "my" "arg" and "with space", and not "with" and "space" :)