I wrote a really, really tiny C commandline program that takes all arguments given to it, and prints them almost verbatim, just 'escaped' in the Bourne/POSIX shell sense of the word.

It's so simple, and not needed too often, so I almost feel like it doesn't need an announcement. But, I have found such a tool useful in some complex shell scripts (and in one case, it was downright necessary), so I wanted to go ahead and throw it up in the repos so others don't have to reinvent the wheel. (Plus it bugs me that there's no standard shell command with an easy to remember and type name to do this. Deep down I hope this might take off and spread.)

It's currently packaged for Maemo 5 [Edit1]and Maemo 4. For Maemo 5, it is[/Edit1] in extras-testing, please review/test, then vote here.

Latest C source code, as well as an alternative shell-script implementation dependant on sed (way less performant/efficient but equally functional, but it may be useful to some, and that's how I originally implemented it): on my github.

If asked, I will happily package it for other systems, I just did Maemo 5 for now since that's what I use [Edit1]also packaged up for Chinook/Diablo Maemo 4 as well now[/Edit1]. The source is so simple it should build virtually anywhere where a C compiler works.

[Edit1]P.S. Yes, there's a typo in the deb package "Description" field (last sentence, s/undesided/undesired/ ), but I felt like that wasn't significant enough to bother packaging it again. Still, if people feel I should package it just to fix that typo, I am amicable to doing so.
No one was voting on it so I figured I might as well remake the package with the typo fixed.
[/Edit1]