It's kind of ironic that the example of "simple" code is a shell command which has many hidden gremlins. Just off the top of my head: - It swallows extra space

It's kind of ironic that the example of "simple" code is a shell command which has many hidden gremlins. Just off the top of my head: - It swallows extra spaces between the arguments. - If the first argument starts with a hyphen the behaviour is implementation-dependent. - In Bash, if there's an exclamation mark anywhere except the last character of any argument Bash tries to do event lookup instead of treating the string as a literal. More fun examples at https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/65803/3645 https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/65803/3645. I would trust the second piece of code much more than the first, despite the complexity.