shell - Passing arguments to a command in Bash script with spaces

Question

I'm trying to pass 2 arguments to a command and each argument contains spaces, I've tried escaping the spaces in the args, I've tried wrapping in single quotes, I've tried escaping " but nothing will work.

Here's a simple example.

#!/bin/bash -xv

ARG="/tmp/a b/1.txt"
ARG2="/tmp/a b/2.txt"

ARG_BOTH=""$ARG" "$ARG2""
cat $ARG_BOTH

I'm getting the following when it runs:

ARG_BOTH="$ARG $ARG2"
+ ARG_BOTH='/tmp/a b/1.txt /tmp/a b/2.txt'
cat $ARG_BOTH
+ cat '/tmp/a' b/1.txt '/tmp/a' b/2.txt
cat: /tmp/a: No such file or directory
cat: b/1.txt: No such file or directory
cat: /tmp/a: No such file or directory
cat: b/2.txt: No such file or directory

Answer 1

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/050

TLDR

Put your args in an array and call your program as myutil "${arr[@]}"

#!/bin/bash -xv

file1="file with spaces 1"
file2="file with spaces 2"
echo "foo" > "$file1"
echo "bar" > "$file2"
arr=("$file1" "$file2")
cat "${arr[@]}"

Output

file1="file with spaces 1"
+ file1='file with spaces 1'
file2="file with spaces 2"
+ file2='file with spaces 2'
echo "foo" > "$file1"
+ echo foo
echo "bar" > "$file2"
+ echo bar
arr=("$file1" "$file2")
+ arr=("$file1" "$file2")
cat "${arr[@]}"
+ cat 'file with spaces 1' 'file with spaces 2'
foo
bar