Thank you for looking at this issue, According to section 4 you referenced "As documented in section 4 of the CLI doc" > Text bounded by a pair of single-quotes or double-quotes is treated as a single argument, with the quotes stripped. That's why I assumed that is isn't useless. > If you want to specify a text literal to that meta-command, you will need to escape the quotes The quotes passed correctly to sqlite3 shell for sure(running bash with option -x can prove it). The issue I believe with parsing in sqlite3 shell. Even if you would run sqlite3 shell alone, interactively, then the issue is still "works": ``` sqlite> .parameter init sqlite> .parameter set @a '+1+2+3' sqlite> SELECT @a; 6 ``` while processing regular SQL statement works as expected: ``` sqlite> SELECT '2+2'; 2+2 ``` quoted value isn't evaluated as it is happens with **`.parameter set`**