[danadam]

> No, the quotes are not seen by the program. The program receives a list of strings, it does not get the information about whether and how those strings were originally quoted in the shell.

With quotes the program will receive a single argument -n␣o␣p␣e instead of multiple ones -n, o, p, e. At least it works on the machine here:

    ]$ echo "-n o p e"
    -n o p e
    
    ]$ /bin/echo "-n o p e"
    -n o p e

[bonoboTP]

Yes, I think there was some misremembering here. The nontrivial thing is to print out -n itself with echo. For example, echo doesn't treat "--" specially, so "echo -- -n" prints "-- -n".