At $OLDJOB we used to use nfs extensively, and a common desire was to run some command on the system where the files actually resided, after navigating there (with cd in a local terminal).

To that end, we developed a script called "yonder", which let you write "yonder any unix command with awful quoting needs". If the filesystem was local, it just executed the command; if it was remote, it took care of all quoting needs, then executing a command like "ssh hostname yonder - ENCODED_MESS".

(A variant, autoyonder, could be used in any shell script by ". autoyonder", so that any shell script could transparently run "over yonder")

I think that in the end we used the algorithm of: - target directory is "argv[-1]" - concatenate all arguments with a space separating - single-quoting everything, who cares if it's needed - replacing single quotes with the 4-byte sequence '\'' the quoting method we learned from git. Earlier versions took advantage of how we had an 8-bit clean commandline but only needed to send 7-bit strings: we just set the high bit on everything, then stripped it off. The NUL between argv values becomes 0x80, the space within an argument becomes 0xa0, etc., with no special shell interpretation. Gross but it fit the bill.

I don't have access to the scripts anymore, but it worked really nicely for the time.