Yes, that’s a valid thing to want. At that point, though, I’d try to write a general shell escaping function, because I don’t trust myself to figure out which

Yes, that’s a valid thing to want. At that point, though, I’d try to write a general shell escaping function, because I don’t trust myself to figure out which host things are OK to include unescaped in such a situation. (Here’s when I start to long for Tcl, despite all the times I’ve had to spell out [string index ...].) The optimal solution would be to have a separate side channel for passing things to the quoted program, like -v in awk or --arg in jq (or whatever it is in your favourite SQL DBMS binding) but I don’t think SSH will let you do that.