[EvilTerran]

Sadly not: only quotes that appeared literally in the command-as-written affect word-splitting or are subject to quote removal, not those resulting from an expansion step (variable substitution, globbing, etc); so you'd end up with four elements in argv (or one if you double-quoted the variable reference), with literal single-quote characters in them. You'd have to do something unpleasant with "eval" to make that work.

It's a sensible rule, when you think about it - otherwise, for example, an expansion that introduced mismatched quotes would cause total chaos.

[grymoire1]

You can include quotes in arguments on Unix systems. The only tricky bit is getting meta-characters past the shell to the command the shell executes.

Example

  #!/bin/bash
  Q1="'"
  Q2='"'
  echo "$Q1$Q2"

This prints

  '"

And if you really understand that ' and " turn quoting on and off anywhere in the line, you can combine these two into a single variable:

  #!/bin/bash
  Q1="'"'"'
  echo "$Q1"

[EvilTerran]

Yeah, that's the very behaviour I'm talking about - it just happens to be a problem in this particular case: the single-quotes in hk__2's PROPS variable would be passed to the executed command, not interpreted by the shell, but we wanted the latter here.