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    Please also include the command that works Commented Jul 5, 2024 at 11:26
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    Please add all relevant information to the question body. Comments are hard to read, easy to miss and can be deleted without warning. The error seems to be from postgres, by the way, not the shell. do you perhaps need to do some special quoting in postgres, like `my_table`? Commented Jul 5, 2024 at 11:57
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    If not, can you try drop_db=(DROP DATABASE "${db1}") and then sudo -u postgres -S /bin/bash -c "psql -U postgres -d postgres -c '${drop_db[@]}'", does that work? Commented Jul 5, 2024 at 12:00
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    @CodeWeed: Why are you calling bash to call psql instead of calling psql directly? Feels like some quoting is likely being eaten up in this layering. Commented Jul 5, 2024 at 12:11
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    right, right, and that's what Chris was getting at. You're right, @ilkkachu, I'm thinking of shell tokenization but it is psql that's relevant here. Commented Jul 5, 2024 at 12:46