Shell – How to execute a command repeatedly with different arguments

Wrap it in sh -c:

nohup sh -c 'wget "$0" && wget "$1"' "$url1" "$url2" > /dev/null &

$@ expands to separate words (whereas $* expands to a single word), as explained in the bash manual. Thus, when you write

zenity --text="$@"

it expands to

zenity --text="$1" "$2" "$3"

However, shell variable assignments do not undergo word splitting. Note that field / word splitting is omitted in the list of expansions for variable assignments in the bash manual. This behavior is consistent with the POSIX spec. So, when you write

text="$@"

the variable text gets all of the positional parameters as a single word, equivalent to if you had written text="$*". Indeed, this is the reason double quotes are often unnecessary in variable assignments. Both

text=$@

and

text=$*

are perfectly safe.

So,

text=$@
zenity --option="$text"

expands "$text" to a single word, which is why this works. Note that the --option="$@" is just a normal argument to the command zenity, and not a shell variable assignment, which is why word splitting takes place here but not in text=$@.