2.2 Arguments

Command arguments are passed to the functions as either strings or numbers, depending on what the parser thinks they look like. If you need to use a function that takes some other data type, you will need to call it in an Elisp expression (which can also be used with expansions). As with other shells, you can escape special characters and spaces with the backslash (\) and apostrophes ('') and double quotes (""). This is needed especially for file names with special characters like pipe (|), which could be part of remote file names.