Why are the arguments supplied for the command run through ssh interpreted by shell before they are passed to the command on the server side?

[Yuri]

On 2020-01-11 05:38, Colin Watson wrote:
> I do think it's a problem that, as far as I can see, the exact behaviour
> of ssh command interpretation isn't explained anywhere in its man pages,
> even though it seems like the only possibility if you understand the
> protocol.  ssh(1) just says "If command is specified, it is executed on
> the remote host instead of a login shell", but that doesn't provide any
> hint about what quoting of metacharacters might be required, which is
> important since ssh is often used as plumbing.


A practical problem stemming from this is "how to pass a string to the 
server verbatim". I just escaped every character with '\'. But is this 
excessive, or generally sufficient? I can't tell since it isn't clear 
how the arguments are processed, and by what shell. It's not documented.


Yuri