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How do you write a function in bash that executes the command that it is given as an argument, where The given command may be an alias Arguments must be passed on exactly as given; no evaluating may be done In other words, how to write an as-transparent-as-possible wrapper function. The goal of the wrapper function could for example be to set the current directory before and after the given command, and/or set environment variables, or time how long the given command takes,... As a simple example here I take a function that just prints a line and then executes the given command. A first attempt: function wrap1 { echo Starting: "$@" "$@" } You could use it like wrap1 echo hello . But the problem is you cannot do alias myalias echo and then call wrap1 myalias hello : it wouldn't resolve the alias. Another attempt using eval : function wrap2 { echo Starting: "$@" eval "$@" } Now calling an alias works. But the problem is it evaluates the arguments too. For example wrap2 echo "\\a" prints just a instead of \a because the arguments are evaluated twice. shopt -s expand_aliases doesn't seem to help here either. Is there a way to both evaluate aliases like wrap2, but still pass on the arguments directly like wrap1?

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